Disk block cryptographic signatures with automatic recovery?

Is this why people run Arch instead or atomic linux distros?

These seem like semantics to me. Saying it isn’t a backup, when it successfully restored my uncle’s 25 years of files after his hard drive failed, doesn’t ring true to me. OneDrive allows recovery of data from ransomware, common user error like deleting or overwriting files, drive failure and catastrophe like fire. What use cases does this backup methodology lack for you that is important for casual end users?

Personally, I architected datacenter backups for a large company with business critical data. This was a decade ago, but even then I was responsible for architecting logical, physical, application, database, snapshot, tape and site replication for about a petabyte of data (hard drives used to be small). When you say that some of those things are not backup, I don’t understand why you think that? Different types of backups have different strengths, weaknesses and use cases.

You can roll your onedrive back to a previous point in time in the event of a ransomware, technical issue or user mistake that causes issue.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-your-onedrive-fa231298-759d-41cf-bcd0-25ac53eb8a15

OneDrive does not do full disk synchronization to my knowledge.

OneDrive is a decent solution for non-techies who need a backup system. I’ve installed it for octogenarians who certainly would never backup anything on their own. It does versioning on the files, so it can protect against ransomware and provide fallback to earlier versions.

Whenever I am remotely helping one of the people I have it setup for, I glance at the icon to see if it is working. Occasionally, I see it complaining about a single file not syncing for some reason, but that generally will resolve itself by the next time I check.

It has a vault that requires additional authentication for your most sensitive files.

I like it—I’m sure its not perfect, but it isn’t terrible.

My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.

I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.

My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.

I honestly wish Apple made a 20” iPad.

You absolutely can roll back to previous versions using the steps in those links. I believe it has a 30 day limit, but that is pretty good for a consumer product.

OneDrive does offer restoration of individual file versions or even the entire OneDrive contents (for things like ransomware attacks). Details are here

I think OneDrive is a pretty good (but paid) backup utility especially for non-technical people. There are a lot of things that I could nitpick on, but for some of the older people (octogenarians) that I am the family support for, I set it up and anytime I interact with their computer I click on OneDrive to ensure it is replicating. I very occasionally have seen a single file not replicating, but never have I seen it fail completely. These people previous had NO backups of any kind.

I use it myself as an additional backup location, but not in the way most people would.

For my Asus laptop the setting is maintained at the hardware level. I didn’t bother trying to find Linux software that could control it (I think there is one) but instead just booted into Windows and set it there and it will persist after that in Linux.

I use an Asus laptop I bought during COVID as my server. I dropped in 64GB of RAM, a pair of NVM drives and an old 2.5” SATA SSD. More than enough for my use cases. The only real software tweak I made was limiting battery charging to 60%.

I’m so used to using powershell to handle collections and pipelines that I find I want it for small scripts on Mac. For instance, I was using ffmpeg to alter a collection of files on my Mac recently. I found it super simple to use Powershell to handle the logic. I could have used other tools, but I didn’t find anything about it terrible.

I even use powershell as my main scripting language on my Mac now. I’ve come around.

I didn’t love them forever ago, but I rather like their new single “The Emptiness Machine”. I don’t follow music so I didn’t know they had lost their lead singer until yesterday. I heard the song and thought, “Linkin Park doesn’t have a woman for a lead singer….”

The amount of bread we wasted before moving our bread to the freezer was crazy. Most of our bread gets toasted anyway, but the microwave handles the rest.

You can get a pass till July 2025 by creating/setting a registry key that they made for businesses.

Paste this in a .reg file and double click it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome]
"ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002

I’m surprised and happy that SUSE is still doing well. I have fond memories of using SUSE in the enterprise especially around their “perfect guest” campaign for using it in virtualized environments. I thought they had very well-baked integration with large Windows networks—things just worked out of the box that didn’t with RHEL. I’m sure a lot has changed in the last decade but I appreciated their cooperative stance in the enterprise.

I use Adguard, vinegar and baking soda, but wasn’t aware of Wipr. I might give it a try as a replacement for Adguard. Glad you mentioned it.

I’m not an Apple apologist, but I feel there are some things Apple does that are privacy focused.

• The ability to E2EE encrypt iCloud is a very simple privacy feature that is accessible to the technical and non-technical alike.
• Private relay provides a double VPN architecture that doesn’t cause constant captcha hell and again just works for non-technical people.
• Hide my email, while not being perfect, is a pretty straightforward method to make throwaway email addresses.

The things I hate about Apple are generally not privacy related.

• They are a mega-corporation that stifles innovation
• They don’t allow other browsers
• They are puritanical about what is allowed in the App store

I really enjoy Apple products, but this is my biggest peeve. It’s not like I cannot manage without a different browser—certainly about half of americans primarily use Safari—but the flexibility and customization of Firefox or chromium would be very welcome.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/changes-medical-inadmissibility-policy-irpa-take-effect.html

I think there is some thought going on about what it means as a society to discriminate against people with disabilities during immigration.

It seems like the US would have a similar problem with people moving between states that had medicaid expansion and ones that do not. I don’t know if there are any studies on the issue.

Discriminating during immigration based on a congenital disability feels like discriminating based on race to me.