I need a shoulder to cry on

[yogi]

A few weeks ago I got a stand up desk as a Christmas present. It's working pretty well and I think the extra exercise I intended my legs to experience is showing the fruits of my efforts. There is a lot of speculation about the benefits of such a desk, but I won't have anything to tell you about that for a little while to come. The jury is still out, as they say.

However, besides potential health benefits, the desk was needed just for functional reasons. That's working out well too, up to a point. I decided since I have a new desk I should have some new Ethernet cables too. There are a ton of wires that needed dressing so that the desk could move freely without disconnecting something. And, as long as I was moving furniture to do that, I decided to upgrade to CAT 6 Ethernet wires. The router is already at that level, and now so are the cables.

It took until yesterday for all the cables to arrive, after which I began to vigorously arrange cables and wires. One of the unexpected benefits of having a stand up desk is that when it is 42" above the floor, accessing all those wires is very easy. So, what am I crying about? It's the UPS that is causing the tears. In the course of my wiring arrangements I unplugged a thing or two from the UPS. To my chagrin one of those things was the tower computer. I've been pretty lucky in the past when power was lost unexpectedly, but not so this time. When I tried booting the computer all I got was a RED screen warning me that I need to fix BIOS because something unexpectedly was changed. My heart stopped for a moment but it turns out BIOS was easy enough to fix by pressing the EXC key. The system went into a self repair mode and presumably fixed everything. Well ... it didn't fix everything.

You may or may not recall that I have installed reFINd to replace the Windows boot manager. So, when I saw that message I didn't know what exactly crashed, Windows, reFINDd, or something else. I have two other Linux systems installed and tried to boot into one of them, Mint. It gave me the GRUB menu and started to boot, but failed. That means nothing would boot and implicates the reFINd bootloader.

Fortunately, Windows anticipated there would be guys like me and provides a way to reset or reinstall Windows. To do this requires unlocking the secure boot disk, which in turn requires knowing the 32 bit encryption key. Well I disabled secure boot a long time ago and didn't understand why they wanted that key, so I just tried again and then got the option for the key or for my Microsoft account login credentials. It accepted my login credentials and proceeded to "reset" my computer per my instructions. The reset will reinstall Windows and preserve all the data. Well, it preserves the data but does not preserve any software that did not come with Windows originally. Things like Thunderbird e-mail client.

I now have a system that boots, but still has a broken reFINd bootloader. I'm using the Windows bootmanager until I can fix reFINd. The task now is to rebuild the computer, not exactly from scratch, but from the first floor up. This is not the first time I'm in this situation. It happened a few times with Windows 7. This is the first time with Windows 10, and I will say recovery was a lot easier once the panic cooled off. My last system backup was a month ago and I had intended to do another one after I got the wires all put in place. If I were smart I would have done backups prior to messing with wires. But I only was replacing Internet wires. What could go wrong with that?

[Kellemora]

I feel for ya Yogi, I really do.
I've had major mess-ups before that required I wipe the drive and start over again.
And a couple of those times it was on my main computers that I needed for my daily work, real work, not play.

I know you do all kinds of designer style system set-ups, that I probably would never get into myself.

I actually totally wiped out one of my backup drives once, all because I forgot to put a / at the end of a Rsync command.
So it happily went through the drive deleting everything on it, before starting to write what it was supposed to do.
It took me more than a day going through my other backups to get everything back on that main backup drive.

At one time, I used to keep all of my wires neatly bundled, by taking a soft plastic tube and cutting it like a spiral so I could wrap it around the wires. Like the little spiral wraps we used on our bike cables in days of yore.
Right after I moved here, all of my wires were bundled using clamps for tomato stems, worked great.
Now they are all just hanging behind the desk!

I had a senior moment the other day when someone mentioned Ethernet cable. I didn't know the term became universal for describing LAN cables. You see, to me, Ethernet cables were 75 ohm Coaxial cables, you had to terminate any open ends. And they were usually wired up like a daisy chain. So we either had an Ethernet wired system or a LAN wired system.
And of course the old Twisted Pair, hi hi.

[yogi]

Those terminated network wires, the ones we used at Motorola anyway, were coaxial and did indeed require a termination at each node. It was so long ago that I don't recall what bandwidth or speed the data on those cables traveled at, but it's whatever was popular thirty years ago. Ethernet signals travel on twisted pairs. The only difference between the various CAT ratings is the number of pairs and the type of shielding inside the cable. Today's routers can spit out data at a multiple gigahertz rate which apparently requires special transmission wires. My new cables are rated at 1 GHz which matches the capabilities of my router exactly. I got CAT 6 cables and noted they are now up to CAT 8. I didn't look up the specs on that 8 wire, but it's got to be something special.

For all the years I've been doing home computing I accidentally wiped out a drive only once. It was one of those old time Zip Drives that I was not familiar with. I ended up formatting it instead of copying the data to the replacement drive. Windows crashed a couple times (at least) with each new version form Win98 on up. As much as people belly ached about Vista, that was pretty stable in my setup. Don't recall if I ever reinstalled it more than once. Win7 had several fresh installs because I never could get the backup image to be recognized. I make those backup images to this day, but never tried to use them. This last go round was fixed with a reset function, which amounts to a fresh install but not eliminating my data. They do eliminate my 3rd party programs, however. To Microsoft's credit, they also provide a detailed list of what they took out.

I realize my computer systems must sound exotic, but in fact they are not stretching the limits in any way, shape, or form. All I'm doing is multi booting Windows, and it so happens I can do that numerous ways. There is the USB Linux on a stick, the virtual machines, and the standard multiple hard disk drives. Windows, and Linux, is designed to multiboot from various devices, but most people don't want anything to do with that. They have a hard enough time with the standard system.

Booting is done through some kind of loader software. In Linux it's grub, but you don't need grub to boot. All you need is a console that can execute shell commands to load the kernel. In my situation I also have the standard Windows boot manager to deal with plus a third one I discovered just in case the others don't play nice. It's that third one, reFINDd that became corrupt when I was playing with power cords. Fortunately I was able to repair Windows so that it uses it's native bootmanager. Unfortunately all the hard drive UUID's are no longer valid for Linux. So both versions of Linux are still there, but cannot boot due to the corrupt reFINd loader. I tried using grub but again it has problems since the UUID's are no longer valid. And Windows just snorts when I tell it to boot Linux. So, I deleted all the Linux OS's from my tower and need to repair or replace reFINd. It's pretty simple and apparently just a matter of replacing a directory with clean files. The directory, the EFI directory, however is protected by Window and does not even allow me to see it. So my current strategy is to build a Linux on a stick and hope I can boot off that. Linux has a tone of EFI software tools.

[Kellemora]

Each step up on LAN cables is only a small step, and that includes CAT 8. For home use, there is no reason to go to even CAT 7, as CAT 6 is about all excellent grade home equipment can handle.
Because I have 200 feet of CAT5E running between my house and the garage, anything less wouldn't work well for that long of a distance. Had to throw away the CAT 3 I first started out with, hi hi.

I had a lot of data on my Apple and MAC computers that got ruined when I had it converted over to Windows 98.
Ironically, the data Wang converted over that I had, from Wang to PC went flawlessly, but only data could be saved, no programs of course. They handled the conversions for my spreadsheets and a few other things from their system so they would work on Windows 98. All of the images I had on the Wang were converted to PCX format. I still have many of them still in PCX format, but convert them to TIFF if I use them for anything. So the originals remain untouched.
I miss one of the programs I had in Windows XP that let me convert between file types with ease, whole files at once.

I wish I understood a bit more about computers than I do.
I have an old computer that the LAN card tests as A-OK with every test I can do to the card itself. Even so, no signal comes out the port. So I just figure it is the port itself that is bad. None of the wires or bent, so it could just be a broken solder joint to the mobo. But I don't mess with that kind of stuff now for 30 years, hi hi. No longer have the tools to do so either.

[yogi]

CAT-5 cable can handle about 500 mpbs which was good enough back in the old days. CAT-6 wires can do 1000 mbps which is mostly used for people who do some streaming. When you get to the CAT-8 level it is speced for 40 gbps which is for homes that have more than one computer streaming simultaneously. I believe the CAT-8 cable also has more than one twisted pair to provide more than a single channel for data transmission. They all have loss when spread over a couple hundred feet.

I've gained some clarity about the problem with my boot manager. At one point I decided it would be necessary to replace the rEFInd boot manager thinking that it somehow became corrupt during the power outages. I then discovered it's stashed away in a partition that Windows hides from view in their secure boot setup. When I reset my Windows OS to get it operational again, it must have decided to change the BIOS to boot in the secure mode because it used to be turned off. Unfortunately, I didn't recall what I did to turn it off. LOL Well I found out eventually and now Windows boots unsecured. Microsoft recommends turning it off if you have problems with Nvidia or certain Linux distributions (think Debian here). But, it's done differently in every version of BIOS so that they could not provide specific instructions. Just guidelines.

It turns out that rEFInd can be installed from any operating system, even Linux. It's pretty simple in Linux. Just run a script and bingo! That led me to repartition the hard drive with the Linux systems on it. I then installed Mint 20.1, which is the latest version but not very impressive. As Linux is wont to do, it took over the boot process because, well, because it can. And, because it was the latest OS installed. I was then booting from grub which had the option to boot from rEFInd. I thought that was amazing since it was apparently broke, but I tried it. It worked flawlessly.

All I need to do now is install the rest of the Linux distributions I care to have and switch back to the rEFInd boot manager instead of using the Windows boot manager. There never was anything corrupt in the basic software. The problem was somewhere in the handoff to grub. Fixing grub fixed the boot problem.

So, now I'm a happy camper. I'll do all that Linux rebuilding tomorrow, and then try to finish the bulk of rebuilding Windows. In the final analysis recovering from a fatal crash was not difficult. Rebuilding the OS after that is a multiple week project.

[Kellemora]

I had to change my CAT5 cable to CAT5e because of the 200 feet from the router to my office gigabit switch. It gave me about a 30 to 40 mbps increase I noticed right away. However, I did have to replace all the little short cables that go to everything, and I think those are CAT6, they are not marked so I don't remember now if the replacement ones I bought are CAT5e or CAT6.

I'm glad you figured out what was going on and managed to get it back to working again.

I really do need to clean off the many OSs I have installed on the Silver Yogi, because when I get a kernel upgrade, it takes forever for grub to find all of them, and most of them are not used now in years.
For some reason, don't remember what anymore, but I think grub is showing me the name of my partition as Debian 8 for the current install. It is for this reason I've been afraid to delete that partition, so in the end, don't do any of them.
Also, the Windows XP Pro MCE I have installed, for some reason no longer boots up either. It used to though.

I bought new CMOs batteries, they are in a package on my desk, hi hi. I just never found the time to get some of these old computers down and replace the batteries in them. Finding room to do that is one challenge, the next one is I have to keep my O2 on 24/7 and if I try to lift a computer my O2 drops like a rock. I have this old Dell computer I want to get a new battery in, and you know what a pain those are to work on, hi hi.

I have big ideas, but no time, no energy, and no money, hi hi.

[yogi]

From what I can tell the Ethernet specs for cabling has only changed in terms of bandwidth and speed. They apparently also assigned new uses for the pin-outs that nobody ever used before, which is how they were able to upgrade the cable to more than one channel. I doubt that you would need anything better than CAT-6 for your network, but if you had the money, time, and inclination, installing all CAT-8 would do nothing but improve the transmissions. Regardless of which cable you have, there is a limit to the length. You might need a booster if you go too far. 200 feet doesn't sound far, but I honestly don't know the specs.

The beauty of using rEFInd is that it is very good at finding bootable devices. You could remove all the hard drives from the Silver Yogi and install just one with your favorite flavor of Debian on it - and rEFInd as the boot manager. You would see only one choice as you would expect, unless you are using UEFI boot. In that case rEFInd will find the kernel in the installed system and boot direct from that, and it will also find the grub loaded into the EFI partition. So, if you decide to plop in another disk with a couple more Linux OS's on it, the rEFInd boot manager will find them and give you the option to boot. This is cool because you don't need grub to be working in order to boot up a system. If grub is also available, that is considered a separate boot choice by rEFInd. Thus you can add and subtract OS's (disk drives) as you please and not have problems booting.

I can't say if rEFInd would be any quicker than grub when it comes to surveying available boot devices, but I suspect it is.

Which brings me to my current computer issues. Originally I thought rEFInd was corrupt, but discovered it is not. The grub files in the EFI partition is what were corrupt. Wiping out Mint and doing a fresh installed fixed that. Then I tried the same with Kali, because that is the other Linux OS I had installed prior to the crash. Well, Kali reported back that it could not install grub. So I simply installed it without grub because I knew I could boot into it using the now fully functional rEFInd boot manager. Grub can be reinstalled from within a live system, and that is what I tried to do with the grub-less Kali Linux. Unfortunately the methods I have documented don't apply to btrfs file systems, which is what Kali uses. All I have to do now is find out how to install grub in a btrfs based OS. I'm certain Kali has it in their documentation somewhere. It just may take a while to find it. If I don't find it, then screw grub. I never did like it and I don't need it. It just would be nice to have in this case.

[Kellemora]

Although we had LAN cable available back then, when I had Wonder Plants, our only option was 75 ohm Ethernet Coaxial Cable, because of the long distance between our terminals.
I have no idea what Wang used when they wired up our greenhouse sensors, it was like 200 feet from the computer to the front of the middle greenhouse range, and our greenhouses were 100 feet long.
I also think most of the sensors were wired up using 4 wire telephone twisted pair, to the terminal box at the close end of the greenhouses. Whatever they did, it worked great all the time.

All of the old OSs on the Silver Yogi do boot up still, all except the Windows XP PRO MCE, which boots as far as the blue screen of death. I've not had time to look into the reason why, since I no longer use Windows for anything, and when it was working I only played FreeCell on it.

I don't want to complicate my system more than it is now, else nobody would know how to use it.
I do have my main backup on a 2 terrabyte NTFS drive that is Windows compatible, so that external drive should work on a Windows computer I would assume.

[yogi]

My first network administrator position was to manage a factory full of terminals and computers. The server room was in the balcony at the far end which meant some cables were approaching 300 feet in length. Those were all coax cables back then. There never was a problem with the network even at the furthest distance, but then you got to consider that the data rate and bandwidth was crude compared to today's standards. That 75 ohm coax was pretty heavy compared to the CAT-8 Ethernet cables used today. Fortunately the only problems I had with that stuff was running the cables through the factory. It was a rat's nest up in the server room in spite of the fact there were only about a hundred terminals. I really like that job and regret that I never went further into learning about networking.

Installing rEFInd would simplify things from a technical standpoint and have no effect on the user experience. Nobody who would look at your data would care about how the computer boots, nor even know what that means. LOL It could make your life more simple but you really aren't doing anything complicated in the first place. If you want to make retrieving your data seamless for future generations, you really should consider putting it all in the cloud. Anybody located anywhere would have access in that case. Then, too, what you are doing is in effect your own personal cloud. It's just not on the Internet. You could set up your NAS to make it all available over the Internet. That way people would not have to know anything about your hardware ... until it crashes. They might have to call on Elon Musk in that case.

You probably don't realize how much you have helped me gain knowledge and experience with Linux. I was into it well before we met but just in a cursory sort of way. You may recall that at one point I did A LOT of research in regard to booting from EFI and multiple Linux installations. It was because of your inputs that I came to a much better understanding of how it all works. Back then you were able to visit the local library and look over the shoulders of some pre-teenaged kids who were using USB memory to hack into the library computers. You eventually provided me with a link to a Linux Mint tech forum, one of the kids gave it to you, where I met some very helpful developers and administrators. In fact one of those guys highly recommended I switch over to rEFInd to make my experiences flow more smoothly. Well, I did.

The things I learned as a result of your helpful inputs saved me a ton of money because I didn't have to call the Geek Squad for assistance. More than that it gave me an opportunity to learn about the nitty gritty of Linux, which to me is more interesting than any of those FOSS distributions developers come up with. This latest problem with booting would have been a disaster if I did not know what I do know as a result of your encouragement. You told me back then to make sure I take good notes an also advised me to write a book about it. LOL Well I did take good notes but the ones I needed to solve this problem were buried too deep for me to find them when I needed them most. But I did find them, and they included how to overcome any grub/boot problems in the BTRFS disk format. Why in all hell people think that is better than ext4 is beyond me.

So, I had quite an interesting few days to start off this new year. I'm feeling particularly glad that I was, eventually, able to solve all the problems with minimal down time. I didn't have to learn anything new. I only had to find my notes to refresh my memory. The take away form all this is that Windows has a marvelous recovery system and a boot manager that always works when it's not corrupt. Linux only has one good method of recovery which is a fresh install. Booting into Linux was and still is a disaster. They have improved over the time I've been working with it and now some distro's even include secure boot options. Window still is easier to use in my opinion. Linux, however, offers the opportunity to expand my technical knowledge base almost every time I have problems with it. Fortunately, I like learning technical things.

[Kellemora]

All I did was pass on some info that I thought could help. I'm not all that Schmartz when it comes to Linux, other than I just use it how it comes out of the box so to speak.
I used EXT4 now on my drives, but do an external backup on an NTFS drive so it can be read by a Windows computer after I'm gone.

I was surprised to find several the computers at the hospital were Windows, but the medical devices were mostly Linux. And some of the computers on the roll around cabinets were some form of Linux possibly RedHat. The only reason I know this is because when they did my EKG, ECG, whatever, when they went to print it out it asked if they wanted to store another copy for NTFS storage computers. The gal clicked NO and moved on to the next test. Ironically, one other person who was testing on me had a MAC laptop on one of the roller carts. I guess those independent machines it doesn't matter, because they all give a paper printout that goes on the charts.

Well, I'm off to do more meds and take a nap.

[yogi]

This is the first thread I'm reading after you have been AWOL for a couple days. I held my breath the entire time and hoped you could outrun the devil. Apparently you did but spent some time in the hospital. I expect to read more about that in one of the other threads. If nothing shows up, then all I want to say is that it's a great pleasure to have you back.

As you know I favor Windows as an operating system, but all that love faded quite a bit during your absence. I learned a lot about Windows cloud storage the past couple days, much the same way I become educated in Linux. There were problems I needed to research before they could be fixed. Just to recap I will remind you that my desktop computer crashed on the last day of 2022 due to my own stupidity. I rebuilt it all back to a usable state with all the daily used programs in place. It then became time for doing backups.

I have a program (Cobian Reflector) that does selected direct copy backups as opposed to compressed zip files that most of the other guys tend to do. The beauty of this program is that I can backup an entire hard drive and extract a single file from it to recover. No unzipping is necessary and I have total control of what gets restored and to where. It's a great program but one minor quirk showed up in the beginning. The naming format on the backup drive includes the name of the file/folder/directory plus the date and time. I've been backing up my Windows Desktop, Pictures folder, and Documents folders under a single file called Environment. The three subfolders get named properly but when the backup ends it renames the subfolders by dropping off the timedate stamp from the title. Knowing the date is important to me so I always ended up renaming those three manually to include the time stamp. All the other backups have no problems with the name format.

I always wondered why those three folders were different. As it turns out they have slightly different looking icons when viewed from the file explorer. I knew something was different but could not discover what it was. When I did the most recent backup, to my utter surprise the folders were there but had no content. This missing backup content problem appeared only after I had reset Windows during the recovery process. Since the backups were empty I then looked into the original location on the C:\ drive, and they were empty too. So the backup program did the right thing and made a direct copy of empty folders.

One of those folders is the Desktop directory. Nothing was unusual with the desktop I see every day. Dozens of icons are spread all over the place as they should be. But the folder in which that data was supposed to be stored was empty.


It so happens that in my user directory, along with Desktop, Pictures, and Documents (all empty by the way) is another directory called OneDrive. That is the name Microsoft gives to it's cloud storage service. Inside the OneDrive folder were the same folders as are in my core directory but they were populated with the expected content. I knew immediately that this meant my files were being stored up in the OneDrive cloud. I knew that would happen when I first installed Windows 10 many years ago at which time I disable OneDrive. Or, I thought I disabled it. Over the years it all worked fine with the content being where I expected it to be until about a week ago when I reset the machine to factory defaults. The default is to use cloud storage so that all my Windows 10 computers would be in sync. Well, I only have one computer which is why I shut down the entire operation.

To make matters worse, in the course of my fiddling I managed to remove all the icons/files that were sitting on my visible desktop. They were not lost. They were sitting on OneDrive and could be downloaded anytime I wanted to fetch them. It took two days to figure it out, but I'm about 90% confident the problem is fixed now. Turning off the OneDrive service doesn't actually stop Windows from uploading files to the server. Deleting the OneDrive folder is futile. It always comes back. I had to actually re-enable the service so that I could get to the settings that allowed me to shut it down. It seems that the server has to be set to "unpair" my PC from their OneDrive. Then, and only then, does the uploading to OneDrive cease. Since my files were not really on my computer, I made a copy of all those three folders from the OneDrive and stashed them away in a safe place just in case. I was told OneDrive would erase all my files from their server if I opted out, but even now they still sit there. Fortunately that's all they are doing. I will eventually log in manually and erase them all once I am confident the desktop computer is working well.

I did a backup again this morning. The truncating of the file names did not stop, but at least all my data is back to where it should be. I also lost one file I created new on the desktop. It seems as if it went to the OneDrive file folder all on its own, but never got uploaded to the cloud. Thank goodness for that. Other files I created didn't move so that I'm at a loss to explain the one that did. At least I now know where to look for things if they go missing.

I still think cloud storage is a grand idea. I don't think the way Microsoft is using it is to my advantage. They make it extremely difficult to turn it off, but not impossible. I am becoming so well educated now and days that my head is swelling up.

[Kellemora]

Debi lost a lot of her files using one of those packaged backup systems that come on a small external drive.
She also had a memory stick type of backup, and like you said, it makes everything into a zip file, and you can only restore the entirety of what is on there.

As for myself, my backups are direct copies of what is in the computer and saved on two external drives.
I can open any external drive and get the data exactly as it appears on the main drive.
Rsync handles most of my backup routines for me.
I never did like full-backups with incremental backups either because you can't put anything back the way you want to.
So direct copies have always been the best route for me to take.

I'm on some pretty heavy drugs right now, makes my head feel almost like I'm drunk and dizzy, plus my scalp feels tight and sometimes a bit buzzy too.

[yogi]

I am presuming your drunk and dizzy feelings are from the high potency drugs you are taking. If you weren't in such bad physical shape I might suspect you would enjoy the buzz.

Here is the link to the backup software I'd recommend for Deb. https://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.html

It's pretty straightforward but it requires some setup. The menus are logical and easy to use so that she might not even need you to assist her. LOL I've tried several backup programs and found faults with all of them. We did incremental backups at Motorola but we were fortunate not to need them to restore a system. It's a royal PITA. On the positive side you lose less data doing incrementals but for home use they are a nuisance more than a help.

By choice I don't put anything on my multiple Linux systems that would require backups. I do frequently save the home environment but never use them for restoring a system. My method for restoring Linux is to do a fresh install. That's the only thing that works every time. rsync is great and used extensively, but like most other Linux procedures it requires a lot of foreknowledge to use it correctly.

[Kellemora]

The only thing that has ever truly been of value to me were my Datafiles, so those are what I backed up.
That being said, I used to make an ISO of my Windows XP installation, AFTER I added the programs I like to use.
But you know Windows and all those constant updates, so very soon the backup was useless.

I do keep everything backed up redundantly on Linux, but not necessarily the Home Folder, except once in a while if I'm moving from one computer to another and the same OS.
Restoring Linux to a newer Distro or to the same Distro is fast enough anyhow it's not a problem.

FWIW: I use GRSync and it remembers all the settings I like for me. I do have a couple of different setting for different purposes, but as long as I select the right one to copy to the new Sync name, I'm home free.
And having a redundant backup of my external drive to another makes sense too, should I blow the original backup by making a wrong entry for the backup. Like forgetting the / and wiping out everything else on the drive.

The only drawback I found with both Rsync and GRSync is that if you make another backup from a different copy set. When you go back to the one you do every day, that is fast and simple, it could take an hour or longer, so apparently it only remembers you last time it read the entire file for that backup, and if it is not the one you do next, it has to go back and memorize the entire thing again. One would think it would save the right file notes for itself under the name you use to run it for each type of backup.

[yogi]

Cobian Refkector, the backup software I use, thinks a lot like I do. Simple minded. LOL Backups are created as jobs and each job has an associated settings window. Basically you must state what type of backup, full or incremental, and whether you want it (zipped) compressed or not. Then a list of directories you want to backup is created along with stating the destination. I have three backup jobs on my list. One is for Thunderbird e-mail. One is for my profile directories, desktop, photos, and contacts. And the last one is for the entire external data drive. I actually do two backups of each of those. One is sent to the NAS and the other is on a portable SSD - my air gap drive. At backup time I can run any one of those individually or select however many of them. Being paranoid I do one at time just in case there are error messages. When backups are complete the saved files are a mirror of the originals. That allows me to pick individual files if I cared to. I don't know how the program is written but it operates like a batch file with a bunch of copy commands. This is one of those programs where it's not necessary to know anything in advance. Pick what you want to save and where you want to put it. It's truly that simple. Then again, it's for Windows. Linux probably has something just as clean, but since I don't back up my Linux systems I've not had to look for any backup software in that environment.

[Kellemora]

What I need to do is make a backup on an NTSF drive that doesn't have EVERYTHING, just what I know the frau will want for sure, and the files marked in my Will to be passed on as copies to certain people I know will keep them going.

I too back up Thunderbird each day, just as I finish doing my e-mail session. I even marked the folder that the e-mail backup is a HIDDEN FOLDER use CTRL-H to see it is there, so whoever is looking for it don't miss it.
Albeit, my Master File Server is well organized so everything current, archived, and permanent files can be easily located by anyone. It's just that there is so much there, that part might make it confusing. I rarely delete anything, hi hi.

[yogi]

My outlook on preserving computer data is entirely different than yours. My first assumption is that even if all my computer work was easily accessible in my absence, nobody would care to go through it. In some ways my computer is a journal of my entire life's activities. Anybody reading just what is here in these public forums would get quite an insight into who I am. I'll admit it's not organized, but the insights into my thinking and activities are clear and prolific. Being prolific is what I imagine would stop anybody from reading about it. When it comes to my computer system there is even more detail and insights. I have letters written to long gone relatives that well document my interactions with them while I was younger and they were still alive. You can't get that information even directly from me right now because I forgot most of it. But who will find it? Who will read those hundreds of letters?

Nobody.

I do backups just to keep my current life organized. My passwords are in the safe downstairs and anybody who cares to hack my computer system when I'm gone is welcome to it. I can't even get anyone interested in Ancestry. I have no reason to suspect they might care about what's on my computers.

[Kellemora]

I have 40 years of genealogy work, over 100 years of photographs, and around 150 years of copied photographs.
Most of those are filed in a way it makes sense to a genealogist also, by name and DOB with a (spouse name).

All of the books I wrote over the years for business, not reading. Some of which my son wants right now, but unfortunately, the ones he wants were lost in the MAC to PC shuffle when the copies all failed.

I have my lifetime diaries in there also, should anyone care to wade through them, all organized now too.

I loved getting hold of several old family documents, some I even kept framed on my wall they were so unique.

[yogi]

The data you want to preserve is a lot more meaningful and valuable than what I have. You have records for an entire family line traceable back to Adam and Eve. All I have is what I did in my spare time and managed to store somewhere in my PC. Potentially records of your family's origins will be treasured by future generations. After my granddaughters get to be my age, I will be totally forgotten. So why bother to get to know anything about me? Now that I've talked to a few people about it, I've learned how little interest there is in ancestors. It's like reading the fine print in an insurance policy. I am certain you do it, but nobody else I know would even think to do so.

[Kellemora]

I have an uncle on my dad's side, who after he retired started getting into genealogy for his family.
It wasn't until all of my stuff was uploaded and available on Ancestry that he knew what happened to all of Aunt Mary's data.
He must have a short memory, because he was mailed the Deutschmann Saga, which was basically a telephone and address directory of all those still living, but set up in family units like genealogy, and then there was a chart in the front, and in the back showing our immediate family tree, with spouses, but not with their parents and brothers and sister. Basically whatever fit nicest on a fold out page in the book.
Sadly, almost all of the people in the first edition I made are now all dead and buried.
Also in the back of that book were blank family sheets for them to fill out and mail back to me for the master genealogy file I maintained.
I get about 2 to 4 e-mails per week now of folks wanting to know more about what is in my tree now that you have to pay to see the stuff on Ancestry.
There was another fellow who was doing family tree stuff that tied in with ours, and we used to see each others trees all the time on Ancestry, then out of the blue, I never see anything from his tree anymore, not even if I purposely look for it.
Like I was, he was also in the World Family Tree project when it was run by Broderbund. Family Tree is now a part of Ancestry, but it is not the same software, similar but different, and Ancestries World Family Tree is not at all the one Broderbund started.

I don't remember how to get to it anymore, but the AKC has a monster sized genealogy database for the Dogs they've registered over the years. I learned a lot of folks who do have registered dogs, might sell a few and the buyers never add them to the registered list, and if they had pups, they can't sell them as registered. Breeders also don't register the ones they sell with a neutering contract so they can't reproduce.