• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.









  • 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 agree that decrypt/encrypt is bad—it is simply not E2EE. The solution would have to be a better method of public key distribution for ‘federated’ systems.

    While I don’t know anything specific about facebook messenger, E2EE doesn’t necessarily preclude what you suggest. A messaging service could store the entire chat history encrypted without decryption keys. When you get a new client you could restore the entire history in encrypted form onto your device. You would then use a recovery key you would possess to decrypt the message history on your end. At no time would the messaging service have the keys to decrypt. I’m not saying that is what facebook does.