Category: Windows

File History on Windows and photos in OneDrive

In addition to the backups I did last weekend, I also turned on File History on my desktop PC. This is kind of like Time Machine for Windows. I’m using a separate external drive for this, so now I have one external drive with my Macrium image backup, and one being used for File History.

I also decided to move all my photos into OneDrive. Previously, I had a big folder of old photos on my desktop PC, containing digital photos from my pre-iPhone days, and scanned photos from ScanCafe. That folder had about 12 GB of stuff in it. Most of that space is used up by the full-resolution ScanCafe photos. I just moved that folder so it’s now under the OneDrive hierarchy. It took a while to upload, but it’s all in OneDrive now.

On the Mac, all my iPhone photos are in the Apple Photos app. I don’t want to try to move that library into OneDrive, since it’s not a normal folder. (And, by the way, it would be so much more convenient if it was a normal folder, but that’s a rant for another day.) Instead, I copied the photos from ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters into OneDrive, which should be all the original full-resolution photos from my iPhone. That’s about 2 GB worth of photos. I’ll need to remember to do that occasionally to keep the copy in OneDrive up to date. I should probably write a script for that.

So now I have all of my photos in the cloud, which is probably something I should have done quite some time ago. And I think I’ve got myself covered pretty well on backups, on both the Mac and PC.

catching up with backups

With yesterday being Friday the 13th, I thought this weekend might be a good time to review and catch up on backing up my desktop PC and my MacBook.

I bought my new Dell desktop back in January, but hadn’t gotten around to running any kind of backup on it yet, which is a little embarrassing. So today I installed Macrium Reflect Free and did a full image backup to an external 1 TB drive. I’ve been using Macrium for PC backups for the last few years, and I haven’t ever had any problems with it. I should probably buy a paid license at some point, but the free version has always been enough for me.

On my MacBook, I’ve been using Time Machine to back up to an external drive, ever since I re-did the MacBook after my hard drive crash last year. I’m not doing that as often as I’d like, since I don’t keep the USB drive hooked up to the MacBook, so I need to remember to set it up and let it run once in a while.

I’ve also been meaning to do a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner, but just never got around to it. So I’m running that now, and I’ve also finally paid for a copy of CCC. (Previously, I’d only ever used trial versions.) Now that I have a real, paid, version of CCC, maybe I can talk myself into running it a bit more often.

I now keep nearly all of my important files in OneDrive, so I don’t feel like I need to make frequent backups, really, but I do like the idea of running some kind of automated backups on a regular basis. My router has a USB port that I can hook up a drive to, and use it as a NAS drive. I used to have a drive hooked up to it, but I never did much with it, and gave up on it at some point. I should try that again, and see about using it for automated key file backups. I’m not sure if it would work with Time Machine, but I could give it a try. (And I’m pretty sure it would work from Macrium on the PC, doing a select file backup rather than a full image. Or even just the free backup program that comes with Windows.)

And I know I should really set up CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Arq at some point, and start doing automated backups to the cloud. I just haven’t quite talked myself into that yet.

Outlook and Gmvault

My new PC is working reasonably well, though there are still a few things I haven’t bothered to deal with yet. When I first set it up, Outlook wasn’t quite working. I spent a little time on that last night, and I made some progress, but it’s still not working exactly right with my Gmail account. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I might just give up on using Outlook with Gmail at all, though I like the idea of having a local database of my Gmail messages, as a backup in case of disaster.

I have also, in the past, used Gmvault to back up my Gmail messages. I had a problem with it at some point last year, and gave up on it. But today I installed the newest version on my PC and gave it another try. It worked fine, pulling in all the new messages since I last did a full sync (which was almost exactly a year ago: Feb 2, 2015).

So I can at least say that I’ve got a full Gmail backup now, though it’s not an easily searchable backup. I’ve thought about setting up MailStore Home and creating a nice searchable archive of all my mail. But I never get around to it. I think that’s going to remain a rainy day project for now. (But maybe there will be a nice rainy day at some point this year, and I’ll give it a try.)

Almost done setting up my new PC

I’m just about done with setting up my new PC. It’s close enough to done now that I’ve unplugged the old PC, and moved the new one to my computer desk. (So I can eat breakfast at my kitchen table tomorrow. Yay!)

Quicken 2016 is working (mostly) OK. It was slightly flaky at one point, but seems to have gotten better. At any rate, my checking and investment accounts are all up to date and all my bills are paid. I want to do some thinking about how I’m using Quicken, and what I might want to change, but I haven’t really thought it all through yet. I even thought about giving up on it and doing something entirely different, but I can’t quite bring myself to give up on Quicken yet.

I installed the software for my Canon PIXMA MX870 and that’s working fine. I’m actually pretty impressed with this printer. I bought it in 2010, when Windows 7 was the current OS, and Canon has maintained the software and drivers for it, so it continues to work in Windows 8 and 10. (And in Mac OS X El Capitan too.) And I’ve never had any mechanical issues with it.

I still don’t have Outlook working, so I’m going to want to fix that. But it’s not that big a deal, since I don’t really use Outlook. I have it set to access my GMail account, but I really just use it as a backup, in case something catastrophic happens and Google loses all my old mail, or they delete my account for some reason, or something like that.

And I spent some time cleaning up my drive, getting rid of the SD versions of some TV shows that I had in both HD & SD, in iTunes. So now I’ve got about 200 GB free on my 1 TB drive. (I think I could free up another 100 GB if I really had to, but I should be fine for now.)

Overall, I think the XPS 8900 was a good choice. It’s a pretty standard machine, so I can do some upgrades later if I want to. It’s got a few big fans in it, but it’s very quiet. And it’s faster than the old machine, of course.

setting up the new Dell

I started setting up my new Dell XPS 8900 last night. I have it hooked up on my kitchen table right now, using an old monitor that has been sitting on my floor since 2010. (Surprisingly, it still worked, after cleaning it up a bit.)

Initial setup was quick and easy. I then got a few essential programs installed via Ninite — Firefox, Evernote, and some others. Then, I set up PCMover Express and started transferring stuff from my old HP desktop. I have almost 750GB to transfer. Overnight, it got about halfway through, so I’m expecting it to finish up at some point tonight. I have both machines connected to my router via wired Ethernet. I probably should have pulled the drive from the old computer, mounted it in the new one, and copied stuff that way, but I was too lazy to do that. And I think it’s safer this way. Opening up a computer and removing the drive always comes with some risk of damaging the drive, which is a lesson I learned the hard way once, a long time ago, and haven’t forgotten!

I wasn’t sure about using the Laplink PCMover Express software, but it seems to be working well. Sometimes “express” software like this is dumbed down too much, and doesn’t let you adjust what’s being copied, but this program lets you pick and choose which folders to copy, without having to jump through too many hoops.

I could also have cut down that 750 GB to about 500 GB if I’d really wanted to. And I should probably delete a bunch of the stuff that I’m copying over later, since I really have a lot of stuff on my drive that I don’t need. I probably have some old ISOs for software that I’m never going to need again, like old versions of Ubuntu or stuff from back when I had an MSDN subscription.

And I have a lot of video files in iTunes that I don’t really need. It used to be that Apple would only let you download purchases once, and wasn’t set up for streaming video at all. Now, you can download old purchases whenever you want, and you can stream video to Apple TV without ever having downloaded it at all. So I could really afford to delete all those old Castle and NCIS episodes. (Yes, I was on an NCIS kick at one point and bought several old seasons from iTunes.)

So anyway, at the rate things are going, I should be able to do some more software installs on the new computer tomorrow. I’m hoping I can get far enough with it that I’ll be able to unplug my old computer by the end of the day tomorrow, and move the new one over to my desk. Then I can clean up the mess on my kitchen table and use it for breakfast on Monday morning.

Dell XPS 8900

I’ve been thinking about buying a new desktop PC for quite a while now. I bought the old one in 2010, and it’s really starting to show its age. I managed to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 about a year ago, but I haven’t been able to get it upgraded to Windows 10. It’s been running really slowly, even after doing the Win 8.1 upgrade as a fresh install, and it just seemed like it was time for a new one.

So I picked up a Dell XPS 8900 from Costco tonight. It’s got a Core i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I like buying stuff like this from Costco, since they have their concierge service, which gives you tech support through Costco, and a 2nd year on the warranty. And Costco has a pretty good return policy. So it’s just safer to buy from Costco than most other places.

I haven’t done anything with it yet, other than taking it out of the box and looking at it. The process of getting it set up and getting all of my data from the old PC to the new one is going to take some time, and I’m not sure how I’m going to approach it yet. Apparently, Microsoft’s old “Easy Transfer” tool for this has been discontinued, and they now just point you to Laplink’s PCMover Express. So maybe I’ll give that a try. Or maybe I’ll skip that and just copy data over the old-fashioned way.

MacBook trouble, OneDrive, and other stuff

My replacement hard drive cable for the MacBook showed up yesterday, which is great, but I had no luck whatsoever extracting the two tiny screws that hold the old cable in place, which is not so great. There are a number of MacGyver moves I could try to get them out, but I’m not feeling really confident about any of them. So I think maybe I’ll be taking the thing into Tekserve next weekend and let them figure it out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something useful yesterday, so I decided to move a bunch of my personal files on my desktop PC into OneDrive. Microsoft announced last week that they were dropping unlimited storage in OneDrive, which annoyed a lot of people. But seeing this in the news reminded me that I have a lot of OneDrive space that I’m not using. I have an Office 365 Home subscription that formerly had unlimited storage, but now has 1TB of storage, which is still quite a lot. So I moved most of the files out of my local documents folder into OneDrive. Now I’m using about 3GB in OneDrive, and I have all of those files backed up to the cloud, and available on both my desktop PC and laptop. I also moved some files out of Dropbox and Google Drive into OneDrive. I have a free Dropbox account, so that’s only good for 2GB, and Google Drive is good for 15GB, but that’s shared with Gmail. So, for anything I can keep  in OneDrive, I think I’m going to try to standardize on that as my default cloud storage.

I’ve found that, while Microsoft hasn’t been great with multi-platform support in the past, they’re currently doing really good with that. Their Mac client and iOS client are both quite good. And they have an IFTTT channel, which might come in handy at some point.

I’ve been thinking about how far I can go with moving stuff into OneDrive. A terabyte seems like a lot of storage, but I could use that all up if I tried. If I were to move all my photos into OneDrive, that would be about 15 GB. A lot, but manageable. And if I were to try to move my iTunes library (music, videos, and audio books) in, that would be another 500 GB or so, which would be a bit too much, I think. But if I limited it to just music, it would be about 50 GB, which might be ok, though it would be a bit of a mess. And I have quite a lot of random DRM-free audio books, comic books, ebooks, and videos purchased through various Humble Bundle sales and other places. The total size on all of those is quite large, but, for most of them, I can re-download them if they get lost. Humble and Big Finish, at least, allow you to re-download past purchases easily.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways that I could get more use out of the services included in the Office 365 subscription. One odd thing that’s included is 60 minutes of outgoing calls via Skype each month. This doesn’t really help me much; I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone plan, so there’s no reason to use Skype for outgoing calls on my cell phone. If I could replace my home phone with Skype, though, that might be useful. But I looked into that, and it seems like that wouldn’t be worth the trouble. First, I’d have to sign up for a Skype phone number, so I could receive incoming calls. That would cost $5/month. And I can’t port my existing home phone number into Skype, so I’d have to deal with having a new phone number. Then, I’d have to figure out how to hook up a phone to use with Skype. Stand-alone Skype phones (and adapters to hook regular phones up to Skype) were a thing for a while, but it seems their time has passed. Looking for any of them on Amazon generally shows them all as being discontinued and only available from third-party sellers. So, in a nutshell, those Skype minutes are pretty useless.

TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, BitLocker, and so on

I still don’t use any disk encryption on my (personal) laptops, but I try to keep up with news about this stuff, and I came across this article about a couple of flaws in TrueCrypt. I hadn’t really been keeping up with the fallout from TrueCrypt’s meltdown a while back, but I knew that there were some forks of it out there.

It looks like VeraCrypt is probably a good fork to choose, if you’re looking for one, as they have already patched these flaws.

I don’t see any mention of this flaw on Steve Gibson’s TrueCrypt page yet. At one point, he was advising that people continue using TrueCrypt, and that there wasn’t any good reason to abandon it. (And that was certainly true at the time.) But now there definitely is a good reason to switch to something else.

Since I have SSD drives in my ThinkPad and MacBook now, I could probably enable BitLocker on the ThinkPad and FileVault on my Mac, without too much of a performance hit. But honestly, there’s not really anything on either of those machines worth stealing, and I’m still nervous about scrambling all the bits on my drives.

Windows Update woes

I have a work laptop that I don’t actually use that often. For security reasons, we can only VPN in from a company-controlled machine, though, so if I want to be able to VPN in from home at all, I need a company-issued laptop.

I try to remember to bring it in to work with me at least once a month, so I can log in to my domain account, pull down Windows Updates, virus definitions, and so on. Well, when I brought it in recently, I noticed that it wasn’t pulling down any updates, and hadn’t since July. So I started troubleshooting. It turns out that Windows Update is still pretty opaque (though there is a log file you can look at). I found a lot of advice about how to kick-start the update process and get it going again, but I didn’t find anything that applied to my situation and worked.

Eventually, I gave up and sent an email to our help desk. Now, obviously, this isn’t a critical issue, so I didn’t get a quick response. But I did get a response eventually, with a question, which I answered. Then, when I didn’t get any follow-up response, and I had a little downtime, I decided to poke around a bit more. (That was probably a mistake.)

I saw in the update history that a few updates had failed back in June. There were some successful ones in July, though, so I wasn’t sure that was the problem. But I decided that maybe rolling back to a system restore point from back in June might get me back to a stable point, from which I could get updates going again.

I did that, but then found myself getting this exciting error message: “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.” So rolling back so far basically broke the link between the laptop and Active Directory. When I searched for that error, I was surprised to see a recent blog post from Raymond Chen about it. His blog often has some interesting and fun stuff on it. And the comments are often pretty interesting too.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have adequate rights to remove and re-join my laptop from our domain, so I handed it off to one of our support techs, so now it’s his problem, but I feel a little guilty about it for some reason. It feels kind of weird to be working for an organization where I don’t have admin rights to anything, after my long stint at a previous employer, where I had admin rights to everything. Here, I can’t join a machine to a domain, nor can I look at our WSUS server to see what’s going on. But, heck, I probably shouldn’t be messing with that stuff anyway at this stage in my career, right?

useful new Windows 10 feature

A better environment variable editor! Seriously, the environment variable interface has always bugged me. It hasn’t changed since, I think, Windows 95. Nice to see them finally getting around to making it a little better.

(See also: this.)