In the book, that's what happens, except that Bowman is able to get to a shelter before decompression completes.

I was thinking of one transaction, where the file is truncated and new contents are written. Either both entirely happen, or neither do.

OTOH, I think you're on to something with a simplified transaction system that allows atomic pairs of operations that can be used to implement things like this, e.g. replace one file with another, ensuring it's written completely on commit.

EFS.

Right click on your profile, go to properties, advanced, check the encrypt box. Alternatively, cipher /e /s on your profile dir. 5 seconds of googling surely would have revealed this.

It sounds like the correct solution is for the file system to implement transactional semantics. That is what the applications need and were incidentally getting, despite it not being in the spec.

Why isn't this being considered as the solution? There are other major OSes have implemented basic atomic transactions in their filesystems successfully, why not Linux?

Then you have some other corruption problem that has nothing to do with the layout of user profiles.

Besides, I didn't have to google to determine the layout, I could see it after a minute of browsing. Google provided me with more formal documentation to reference in my post.

I never said there weren't other problems. I consider the default name for those paths to be hideous. Plus with the ridiculous and horrible limitation that is MAX_PATH in so many Win32 components, that is path real estate that we can't afford to spend. Parts of Win32 go to great lengths to work around MAX_PATH, including searching for shorter surrogate paths to use instead. .NET, foolishly built on Win32, has the same problems.

At least they changed the defaults to "Users", "Documents" and "AppData", etc in Vista.

I was responding to the specific complaint that profile paths were arcane and not understandable.

The preference files in the Windows user directories are hidden in arcane locations.

It took me 5 seconds to google some docs for user profile paths: User Data and Settings Management

Makes sense that the Outlook data would be in C:\Documents and Settings\\Program Data\Microsoft\Outlook but it's not.

Instead, the roaming stuff goes into:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
And the non-roaming stuff goes into
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
Doesn't seem so awful.

The only way to ehfin find it is to back the stuff up! What if the computer crashed and I can't RUN outlook???? I'm hosed (this actually happened)

Copy the user profile over?