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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Never heard of Meshtastic before, quite the rabbit hole, and sounds super awesome!

    Had a look at your other thread (not a member there so seems I can’t comment, or maybe it’s just my client), and trying to understand what you guys are using these for.

    Official site says “Hiking safety GPS”, something to that effect, but all this talk of “local topics” has me confused. What’s your use-case?












  • Agreed, which is funny because he’s an intelligent guy, and I wouldn’t normally take him for someone who’s fall for this type of confirmation bias, but tech is a blind spot.

    Also, I think he sees me as someone who is overly cautious (for one thing, there are some differences in opinion about how my wife and I raise our kids), which probably means that because the warning about his IT setup is coming from me, it’s already somewhat tainted by that.

    * adult son is over reacting; take with grain of salt; roll eyes *


  • Thank you 😊

    I’m happy to help, and she wrote a very sweet message to say thanks, she was very happy 😁

    And I’ll be very pleased once we get it all sorted. I left her computer copying the files from that sketchy drive to the other one, so at least, until I go back, there should be a bit of redundancy 👌


  • Just spent 3 hours today with my stepmom trying to tame the “backup” situation on her work computer (a Mac). I’m just going to dump the (somewhat angry) rant I wrote my wife on the way home on the train:

    … and then helping [stepmom] with computer backup for ~3 hours. Made a lot of progress but will need to go back for round 2, need her to get another external drive first.

    Apparently her “IT guy” is some old colleague from previous job. Most braindead setup I’ve ever seen 🤢

    Use Carbon Copy Cloner to “backup” (copy) her Desktop and Documents folder to a local OneDrive folder, hope that gets clouded from there. Last time I was there, OneDrive wasn’t even running, so nothing was happening. Even if it had been, it was set to “leave local files where they are”, so her HDD was almost out of space. This time, it couldn’t even be opened because her OS is too old to run it 🙄

    Another CCC backup set to copy “full computer” to an external drive (to external root folder, relevant later); CCC full backups are 1:1 clones, so can be restored onto new hardware … unless the external drive isn’t formatted with same filesystem as computer. Of course, it wasn’t (FAT32 for a 5TB drive🙄). Oh, and only set to backup on “drive reconnected”, so no backups if she leaves it plugged in. Which of course she did.

    On top of that, her main working folder is, of course, her Downloads, all 400 GB of it (and none of it added to any cloud backup in any way) 🙄 So once in a while she would manually move (not copy) files to both of her external drives, one reliable LaCie Rugged, one sketchy no-name drive, to clear up space. Except that “full system” CCC backup that runs on “reconnect” is pointing at the reliable drive’s ROOT folder, so every time that runs it would delete ALL the files she had manually moved there 🙄

    Luckily she has that secondary (sketchy) external drive; all the files on the rugged one are gone forever.

    Also - OneDrive for “backup” - what would happen if that folder was deleted locally? It’s fucking SYNC! OneDrive would simply remove the files from cloud (if the program had even been (capable of!) running)!

    What an idiot 🙄 Wonder how many other people he’s “helping” 😬 I should just follow in his wake and make a living fixing his stupidity.

    Also on the To-do for next meeting:

    1. set up a password manager, as her current system of manually copying her passwords (all of them the exact same 5-letter word, followed by the exact same 4-digit year, followed by one of 5 symbols, rotated for “security”) from last year’s paper calendar to this year’s paper calendar (with little or no notes about what they’re actually for) is … less than ideal.

    2. install software (Eagle) to manage her ~600 GB collection of work image files, half of which are in folders in her Downloads folder, the other half living dangerously on that sketchy external drive, all of them in semi-randomly named folders with nothing even remotely resembling any sort of system.

    3. copy the files on the current Rugged external drive to the new Rugged external drive so I can format the current one to a FS that can handle TimeMachine.

    4. upgrade her OS so OneDrive can actually run, although I won’t be using it for “backup”, because:

    5. setting up a proper cloud solution (B2) with proper backup software (Arq or Kopia) to make daily cloud backups of the primary external.

    6. setting up her external drives (at that point two Rugged drives) so one does daily backups (CCC + TimeMachine), and the other does a weekly backup of the first one before getting locked in the safe, with primary also hosting all her images.

    Wish me luck 🙄