UPS Test

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yogi
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UPS Test

Post by yogi »

The inevitable occurred yesterday evening. A violent spring storm of several weeks ago threatened the integrity of my Windows 7 operating system when it took the power out a few times. Although I'm having some second thoughts about preserving Windows 7 given that Windows 11 is right around the corner, I acquired an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and line conditioner as a precaution against damage from future violent storms passing through O'Fallon. Setting up the UPS was as easy as falling off a log. Learning to read the UPS logs was a little trickier, but not much. The self-test worked flawlessly when executed. I was ready for the big time, but as you can imagine I really didn't want to test it out under live conditions.

Mother Nature performed the ultimate UPS test for me last night. The approaching storm was clearly visible while looking out the window in the command center. Lightning of copious quantities ominously announced a very active storm was approaching. The violent storm warnings from the US Weather Bureau were soon to follow. We were in the middle of it all. And then the winds began to bend the trees lining the front street just before torrents of water fell from the sky. Baseball sized hail was suggested as a possibility, but fortunately we were spared that disaster. The angriest part of the storm showed up on the radar map as PINK. That's one step beyond the dangerous RED zone warnings. I was fixated on the weather map displayed on my laptop and kept my other eye view out the window. Then, the inevitable happened. The room light went out, but the computer tower, the monitor, the router, the NAS and most importantly the modem connection to the Internet didn't blink for a single millisecond. I sat here amazed by it all. It only took a minute or so for the power to return. But, the gods of dangerous pink thunderstorms weren't satisfied yet. For the next ten minutes or so the lighting flickered on and off several times. Bless those folks at Ameren Missouri and their smart power grid. I debated in my mind whether I should shut down the computer or not. I chose not to, but did shut down the NAS just to see if I could under real time storm conditions. Half hour later all this threatening weather has off to the STL area, where it killed the Spectrum cable connection. All my connections to the Internet were solid and stable. Unfortunately, the Internet disappeared for a few hours. Well, the clever phone network still was working, but that's no fun.

So, I am happy to report that the equipment in the CCC survived last night's assault by the Gods of Global Warming. After things calmed down a bit I looked over the event log in the NAS. It reported an unexpected shutdown, not yesterday during the storm but the day before. That report puzzles me given that I am unaware of any interruptions in power that might have caused it. About the only thing I can think of is the UPS failed at the socket that supplies power to the NAS. Hmmm ....
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Kellemora
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Re: UPS Test

Post by Kellemora »

I'm glad to hear your UPS worked better than expected!

We get split-second electrical outages all the time. Usually too fast to cause any but the oldest computers to reboot.
Sometime we don't even know there was a short outage until we look at the stove or microwave. The stove will show PF for Power Failure on each display, but it's clock is always right, unless the power is out for like 15 seconds or longer. The microwave will be flashing 12:00 if the electric even flickers so fast you can't see it.
But nothing else in the house, like the other clocks let you know anything was amiss.

As of late, our cable has been out more often than our electric. Usually not for long, like 10 to 30 minutes, rarely for over an hour.

My old 2008 computer with WinXP just up and died for no reason.
It would boot into bios, and showed no errors, like one old computer I have shows CPU fan failure, then shuts back down again.
I booted it back up again a few times, only to get stuck at the bios screen, then it finally let me know everything was A-OK except it kept saying Auto-Sata 1.... and hung there. So I figured the HD must have went south. Then it dawned on me, there are no Sata ports in this old computer, so what the heck.
I went back into bios and went to boot order, it showed I had 2 HDs both IDE drives, and both flagged as OK. With drive 1 set as the boot drive.
So I booted it back up and just let it sit there on the bios screen where it eventually shows all is well, and waiting for Auto-Sata1.... I just left it like that, and later in the day had a black screen with a diagonal line of skewed blocks on it so they looked like diamonds. I left it that way while doing something else, came back later and rebooted, and it booted up just fine.
Whether it is still that way right now I don't know, since I have to switch the KVM to it to see.
I did a drive test and they all show OK, so I don't know what caused that. Perhaps just olde age, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

Besides looking for some kind of bootable device, BIOS also does a self-check of all the gizmos you have attached to the motherboard. I'm guessing you have a SATA controller in there somewhere even if you don't have anything connected to it. That part of the BIOS self-check seems to be failing. It could be a corrupt SATA controller or it could be the BIOS firmware that is corrupt. All it takes is one misplaced bit in memory to screw up the whole system. If you can set the SATA controller to disabled, that might be a good way to determine where the problem is. Since you don't have any devices that need the SATA bus, you can just leave it disabled. If the BIOS firmware itself is trashed, then the best you can do is hope a replacement firmware file is available online somewhere. The mobo manufacturer web site would be a good place to start looking. My ASUS can load BIOS updates and burn in new firmware off a USB stick. A computer from 2008 might not have that luxury, but it is generally possible to re-flash BIOS without any expensive eeprom burners. But, then, this is a 13 year old machine, and Win XP ...


I am perfectly happy with the events of last night's thundering storms vs my computer equipment. The fact that the tower power was preserved was a major success. But, even greater than that was the flickering line voltages that never happened on the output side of the UPS. Those flickers can do a whole lot more damage than an absolute failure. No doubt that is what contributed to the failure of the computer you talked about.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by Kellemora »

You know, you just reminded me of something.
I think I did get a Bios upgrade that was a pain to do.
And FWIW: There are no SATA ports on this Mobo. I don't think SATA was invented yet, hi hi.
It has been running fine ever since it got over it's glitch the other day.

When we lost all of our electronics, it was when my LAN cable that stretches between the house and the office in my garage took a hit from a lightning strike. It did one heck of a lot of damage to nearly everything here that was connected via the LAN.
I as able to get a couple of the computers fixed fairly cheaply though. But the rest were toast, hi hi.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

The LAN is a good-news/bad-news story. Your story of lighting traveling down the Ethernet cable is a perfect example of what is bad about being totally connected. I'm more concerned about something more likely to happen which is a ransomware attack. The bad actors are getting to be very bad and are not just high school kids from the computer club with a lot of time on their hands. It's easy enough to get infected and for the malicious software to break into every device on your LAN, be it wired or wireless. It doesn't matter what OS your are running or what file system is on your hard drives either. They have ways around all of it. One interesting bit of information I learned about recently was in regard to the methods used by some ransomware. They will download a Trojan that sits around doing nothing until it gets instructions from headquarters. At that point one of the first things the Trojan does is check to see if the target is inside a virtual box or sandboxed. If it is, then it just shuts off and does nothing going forward because being inside a container like that it knows it can be captured and analyzed by the guys wearing white hats. You would think, then, that running all your machines in a virtual box might be a good idea. Well yes it is assuming you can get ALL your network devices protected that way. It could be possible but in practice is very difficult to put something like a smartphone into a VM, or your NAS, or even your printer with a built in Internet server. So, in the end, it would probably be a good idea to have more than one LAN. One would have only a few of your most sensitive machines on it inside sandboxes or virtual boxes and the other can connect the most vulnerable devices. I'm sure there is a way around that too, but it would make life difficult for most attackers.
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Re: UPS Test

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We've only been hit with one ransomware attack, and it came in through Debi's Windows computer, got on the LAN and manage to hit all of my storage devices, even those connected to Linux computers, which surprised me big time.
And you are right about it hiding a Trojan in the system.
Because even though I have an off-site storage not connected to the LAN at all.
In fact it is not plugged into anything until I get ready to do the monthly backup.
Then I carry that drive up here to the office, and copy my backup to it.
Then it gets unplugged and taken back to the house and stuck on the shelf again.
I wondered why my backup took more than twice as long as usual, and I found out.
The ransomware program hijacked the files on my backup also.
But they only hit .doc .jpg, and a few others, so none of my .tif files were harmed, nor my .odt files.
Even so, almost all of the camera shots, and many of the recent scans were all in .jpg format, so they were gone, poof.

I kept all of my backup drives as NTFS so they could be read on Windows computers.
But now I keep a copy on an EXT4 drive, since I knew the ransomware didn't hit those drives at all.
However, it's like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.
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Re: UPS Test

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I don't know all the details, plus not every attack is executed the same way. The first step in a sophisticated attack would involve some kind of innocuous Trojan that isn't easily detectable by antivirus software. Nothing really happens at this stage other than the hidden software checking out the system's environment. Once it decides things are ok, it then will download an executable that of itself is generally harmless. However, when that executable receives instructions from abroad, it will either download a temporary script or run it's nastiness from a remote server, whose IP changes immediately after it does its dirty work. Just about all ransomware is wormy, meaning it can and does propagate to anything it finds on the network. In your case it didn't attack the ext disks, but you were lucky. Nothing is safe in today's world.

It's never a good idea to connect your backup media directly to a system that is or was recently infected. It's not always easy to sanitize a system once it has been infected, and in some cases the bad guys hide inside the BIOS firmware. Thus, even if you reformat all your disks and reinstall everything fresh, they will get you when you boot the next time. Air gap protected backups probably should be copied over to some other media for the restoration. That way the original, and untouched by your LAN, backups would remain pristine. Even then you need to be absolutely sure the intermediate media you copy the backups to is clean.

And, yes, it's too late now to be super cautious.

A lot of the reading I've done on the subject claims that putting backups in the cloud is the only safe way to go. Those cloud people have ways of keeping things clean and always available. My thinking is to do both, air gap and cloud storage. Then, only run your OS from a virtual box to contain anything that might happen there.
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Re: UPS Test

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I used to make a CD of my most important files for safe keeping, I did this after a major change in the data, which could be monthly on some things, and even weekly on others.
So I had all this data to fall back on, but none of the new programs by the same company can read the old data from their former programs, so it all became fairly useless to me.
I did find some programs that could convert the old files to the new format, but at a cost.
This is one reason I went back to saving hard copies on paper, and also creating a PDF if possible of those files, if not I would scan them and save them as a TIF image file.
Good thing too, because I discovered CDs actually ROT. The foil corrodes and they are no longer usable.

My wife has some games she saved in a cloud, but a lot of good that did, although they are live games per se and can be played like a live CD but from the cloud, many of them do not work on computers after the WinXP era.
So I told her just to delete the ones that won't work on her Win7 machine to save what little space she has.

She's like me in a way. I have some old games I love, like Spider and FreeCell which I still play daily during breaks.
It's just a shame when they issued upgrades of those games, they just don't work the same, and some don't have the same features the older games had.
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yogi
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

When it comes to software, it's pretty much like the physical world. Planned obsolescence is the business model. As you have discovered, no matter how well you protect your data, the software that created it breaks eventually. Then there is hardware which is constantly evolving. Whatever you had on floppy discs, for example, would be hard to play back in today's world because the disk drives have vanished. Keeping a vintage system running to get around that problem only works until the old hardware breaks. I've been involved with computers ever since PC's were invented and I can assure you nothing lasts forever. If you don't upgrade the software and the hardware and generate new data to go with it, you are guaranteeing loss of data down the line.

Enterprise systems are a little different but not immune form upgrades that are inevitable. Businesses of any substantial size keep their critical information in databases which are configured in house. There still are some issues when your old database needs to migrate to a new version, but it's not nearly as difficult as trying to get Windows XP software to play on Windows 7 for example.

It's hard to believe but CD's do deteriorate over time. Memory sticks have the same problem. About the only durable device for storage is the old tried and proven hard drive. I'm not sure how long they last either because they are mechanical devices with a finite lifetime. About the best compromise I can think of at the moment would be a RAID system where you can swap out storage on the fly. That's a lot of trouble and expense for the average home computer user which is why the cloud is being recommended for safekeeping.
Last edited by yogi on 24 Jun 2021, 18:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: UPS Test

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.txt and .bmp have been around since day one and are still readable by most programs.
The problems are when proprietary programs keep changing how they handle their own data. Newer versions can't read older versions of the same documents. So it is a never ending battle of paying for upgrades, copying the data over, converting it to the new format, and saving it again. Not everyone can afford six thousand dollars a year for upgraded software programs.

I did have a RAID system, it was hit by lightning which destroyed the PROPRIETARY controller card. The two hard drives were OK but unreadable by any other device. So I formatted them and use them for normal storage on my machines.

I have a file drawer with about 20 5-1/4 floppy drives in it. Trouble is, they won't work on any of the new computers.
I did have an external connector for them on one of my older computers, so was able to copy all the data from my old 5-1/4 floppy disks onto CDs first, and then decided to keep it all on an array of old IDE drives. Now I have everything stored redundantly on SATA drives. But that don't mean I can use some of the data created with programs that no longer exist.

However, that is where Linux Distro's and its programs have come to the rescue for me. There were several files I wanted to have access too, and I found some programs that would read a lot of that old data, and for free too, and it would convert it over to something more generic that remains fairly constant in the industry. Even so, as I had time, I was putting a lot of it on paper printouts just to be safe.

What happens to your cloud storage stuff if the company running it goes bankrupt, or their building goes up in flames?
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Re: UPS Test

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Pure data has the luxury of being very comfortable in a database. The documents/data you and I generate on our home systems typically are custom software programs dedicated to specific tasks. Of course the manufacturers have a financial interest in keeping their software unique. In fact some of them do things that no other programs can do. All this specialized information and data would be useless anywhere outside the environment in which it was produced. When the company and their software changes, then you must migrate to the new system or be prepared for your data to die a slow death. People like us will not lose much when that happens, but business enterprises can't exist if their data becomes useless every three or four years. You are right to point out that this updating business can be very expensive. Then again, you knew that before you decided to go that rout, right?

Purveyors of cloud storage space are prepared for catastrophes. They better be because the law suits that would ensue after losing critical data would be insurmountable. You can be certain that at least the well established cloud storage companies will not lose your data due to a fire in the server room, or earthquake, or flash flooding, or any other acts of god. The funny thing about that is they have it all backed up to some other clouds. Business failure, or worse, data stores that are compromised by bad actors, are the reasons you would want to go with well known and established companies. Microsoft, a two trillion dollar company, isn't likely to end their cloud services any time this century. They also have world class security experts on site 24/7. I could say the same for Amazon, Google, and Apple. But, of course, the best laid plans of men and mice can and do go wrong. Be that as it may, while those big guns are not perfect, they are the best chance a company has to preserve their critical data.

As an aside, think about some of the compromised databases that have been in the news lately. I don't recall any of those companies losing cloud data. All of it was in local storage and not redundantly stored off site. I won't say it's impossible for cloud servers to be taken down, but when was the last time you heard of such a thing? I can't think of any either.

Then, too, disaster recovery plans do not rely entirely on the cloud. All critical data is backed up redundantly. Microsoft's data center could get swallowed up in a sink hole, but that is only the backup of your normal backups. I know cost is a factor and most of us desktop users don't need that kind of security. It is available, and safe, nonetheless.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by ocelotl »

¿What UPS brand/model you got? I've been using the same UPS for 8 years, only thing it has needed is a battery replacement 3 years ago. Happened to know the manufacturer facilities, design and manufacturing area, they got my confidence and haven't let me down...

Also have three copies of everything, in different HD's, and update the backups only offline and after a thorough checking... It's time consuming but helps sleeping well.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

~Juan

This is the UPS I have: https://www.tripplite.com/smartpro-lcd- ... rt1500lcdt

It's made by a company called Tripp-Lite and in one of the other threads I tell an interesting story about them. When I worked at Motorola they favored using isobar surge protectors. I also had a couple in my home office for many years. When I purchased the UPS, little did I know the same company made these surge protection devices. That surprised me, but then I discovered the Tripp-Lite company is located in Chicago only a couple miles from where my cousin once lived. It's all an amazing coincident.
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Re: UPS Test

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Who woulda thunk a big company like Microsoft would abandon their flagship programs after convincing millions of people to keep their data in their .wri format? msWrite was one of the very best programs, still has features never found in any other word processor since. Why do you think they dumped one of the best features they ever had, and not included it in msWord?

Since I was using Windows computers, I trusted all of my business tax reports to Turbo-Tax for many years. If you had a business account, they would maintain your filed tax records for you so you could access them from there website, no need to keep paper copies. I made the mistake of believing them. Their costly business recovery website disappeared, never to return, about the same time they came out with the ultimate spyware version of Turbo-Tax.
I switched to H&R Tax-Cut after that, and kept paper copies once again of my returns.
Now I use Free Tax USA because it costs nothing, and we don't have state returns here.

I also got started with QuickBooks, then upgraded to QuickBooksPRO when I was in the Real Estate Renovations business.
After 9/11 and that company went south, I could no longer afford the expensive QuickBooksPRO and all of their upgrades.
However, my existing version worked just fine the way it was, so I continued to use it without doing upgrades. It worked just fine, until I decided it was time to buy a new version, and that is when I found out my current data could not be converted to their new system unless I bought two intermediate versions between what I had and their latest.
That's when I switched to Linux's GNUCash and have used it ever since. It's not as easy or fancy to use, but is better than the old Cougar Mountain Accounting programs I've used in previous years.

Switching to GNU/Linux was probably the best move I ever made! Saved me countless dollars over the years too!

The cloud may be safe as far as backups go, but is it safe from hackers getting to your data?
Also, using the cloud costs money, a lot of money with the amount of data I keep.
Which will probably all be discarded when I croak, hi hi.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by ocelotl »

At least you can file your tax reports with different software, we can only use the software provided by SAT (Tributary Administration Service), and it only plays with M$ Windows... Bureaucracy at its finest...

I use this UPS model: https://www.isbmex.com/producto.php?producto=120
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yogi
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

msWrite was a standard word processor included with ... Windows 1.0

Yes, WINDOWS 1.0

You are a businessman and I am certain you can appreciate why Microsoft abandoned software that nobody uses anymore. You may favor it and actually have a need for it, but supporting it just for you isn't how Microsoft became a 2 trillion dollar business. :rolleyes:

As your experience with TurboTax shows, Microsoft isn't the only company that deprecates software which nobody is buying in today's world. I fully understand what they are doing, and I have abandoned TurboTax for similar reasons. Both Microsoft and Intuit (TurboTax owners) specialize in selling software. It is incumbent upon software companies to stay current or face the consequences. If they don't sell updated software, they will have no customers at all. Support for older products is a loss even if the products were popular.

I can't say much about how I'd run a business given that I never was inclined to try. But I did work for a company whose livelihood depended on keeping their business data safe and secure. They did backups and upgraded religiously. I realize you don't have the resources that Motorola had, but your disaster recovery plan should be about on the same level. Cost is much more of a critical issue for you, and you are doing the right thing given the resources you have available. As I mentioned earlier, no plan is bulletproof, but you can stack the odds in your favor. The Cloud seems to be the safest and most secure way to backup critical data in today's world. It can go down. It can be hacked. It can also be protected by the people who run it. Should I decide to become a entrepreneur some day, the cloud will not be my only safety valve. But it will be an option.
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Re: UPS Test

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I was still using msWRITE only as far back as five years ago. Then after I had the page the way I wanted I would convert it to a doc file. Usually by opening it in Linux and saving it as odt and doc to retain the formatting.
It's just a shame that no major word processor had the powerful capabilities of msWRITE.

When a company makes a program that generates documents for the government, they should make sure those documents can be read 20 years down the road. I do that now by making paper copies, and scanning the paper copies as a tiff file, or in some cases as a pdf file.

You already know my crazy redundant backup system. Done via USB to portable drives I can store one at the house and one up here.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

I probably used msWrite at one time or another, but I have no significant recollection of it. It's hard to imagine that the overkill built into today's word processors does not match what a 1985 vintage program was capable of doing. I've noted that many times you talk about your special requirements and how just about all of today's readily available software is incapable of meeting them. While it's true that msWrite did satisfy your needs at some point I think it's fair to say people who buy word processors today do not have the special requirements that you do. Thus the vendors support what is popular and profitable to them.

Hard paper copies of documents is one way to preserve them long term. I'm pretty sure that's what they do in the National Archives. If you choose to digitize those documents, it's up to you to do it in a fashion that meets your long term needs. It seems as if you have developed a preservation method you can rely upon. As long as the free and open source software doesn't change, you will have everything you need going forward.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by Kellemora »

Here is a quick example of why msWrite was so wonderful.
You could format an entire page using different size fonts, with unique line spacing for the effects.
Then you could increase or decrease the entire page without messing up the formatting.
In other words, you could make it print on 4-1/4 x 5.5 stock and have it look exactly the same as on 8-1/2 x 11 Dodger stock.

Or, you are typing up documents, in 12 point, using 8 point spaces between paragraphs, and 10 point spaces before each title.
Your document runs over a full page by only a couple of lines.
On msWrite you could hit a single button and make it fit the page.
On msWord you have to adjust each element of the page, provided you used the special formatting for each when you did the work. And even then, you may have to toy with it a few times to get it to fit just right.

On msWrite, when you hit the global decrease button, all 12 point type would drop to 11 point, 8 point spaces would drop to 7 point, and all 10 point spaces would drop to 9 points.
You could also go the other way, and use global increase, which raised all the existing settings by 1 point.

This was a great feature for those who had to make signs with a lot of text on them, and have them come out right at the touch of a button.

At one time, I used to save nearly all of my images, scans, and photo's in PCX format, because it was a lossless format and the preferred method used my Micro$oft. I spent a lot of time converting many of those images over to TIF format. Then I got lazy and just saved all images in JPG since that is what the device outputs saved them in to start with. However, since I knew JPG was lossy, I began converting JPGs making a BMP copy. A few years later I was back to saving things or making a backup copy as a TIF file, especially after the ransomware locked out all JPG and DOC files.
The downfall of doing that, meant I had several copies of the same thing on different hard drives, which is why I started going through all my old IDE drives and extracting stuff I did not have on my main backups. I still have too many duplicates, hi hi.
But it doesn't replace all of those things we lost though that were not backed up redundantly yet, like almost all of Debi's pictures that she never backed up except on her own computer, the main one hit by the ransomware.
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Re: UPS Test

Post by yogi »

Back in the beginning days of the Computer Age, Motorola made PC's. No doubt you never heard of them nor seen one, but they did exist and we had to equip all our offices with them. Yes, those machines used the CPU manufactured by Motorola which created an interesting problem. Because it was such a unique processor, just about nobody was writing software for them. I don't know where it came from, but the counterpart of MS Office was something called Page Maker. It looked like a word processor, but it was much more than that. In fact it was too much more, but it took a long time for the executive management to figure that out and we had to use this one of a kind software on a one of a kind computer in order to conduct critical business.

Page Maker was in reality a page layout program. A single page could have many object boxes on it with each object formatted in wildly different ways. These objects could be arranged to sit anywhere on the page, even outside the margins which confused the hell out of a lot of people when they tried to print it. LOL Like the msWrite you describe, Page Maker's layout could be resized to suit the medium. You could put an entire page on a postage stamp or on a poster board and it would be proportioned correctly because each of those layout objects ended up inside a page container which could be formatted to suit the situation.

Page Maker vs MS Word was a classic example of object oriented programming vs linear programming. I don't know if msWrite was object oriented or not, but today's MS Word is a combination of both, as is Open Office and Libre Office. You can embed objects in a linear text format, but unless you put it all in HTML there is no way to retain the individual object's formatting from a global (page) scale. I'm pretty sure you can get page layout software now and day. You might even be able to get an updated version of Page Maker. The problem doing that would be the file formats would not be the traditional ones everybody is using. Object vs linear, you know?
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