Evaporated:
Susan was kind of forced into a Day Away From Home Today; Mere WANTED MOMMY, both for the roller-skating training at a local rink, and to take her to Susan’s aunt’s house in Elgin so Mere could Have Her Long Awaited Beauté treatment - hair highlights, manicure and pedicure (all on Auntie’s tab, not ours). It is to gack loudly at the froofiness of it all, of course, but that’s part of Having A Girl Child, I Guess.
Susan didn’t really want to go along - she had a long list of things to do here - but the final straw was when Auntie herself called up and asked for help on some bad tech issues Auntie was having with her computer. So Susan sighed and went with Mere and Connie (my MIL and Auntie’s sister). Of course, Mere was absent from Auntie’s house with Auntie for the froofy stuff while Susan stuck around and drudged over Auntie’s computer. Oh, the excitement.
In the meantime, I got our household server going again - by yanking the probably defective HD - and oh, I want badly to set up a new install on the server and just clean it all out. It’s messed up a whole bunch of ways - the burner doesn’t work, the network won’t see anyone else (there’s something majorly screwed with the Samba and network stuff), a lot of programs are Just Not Working Right or throwing weird glitches. It’s gotten to the Too Screwed To Fix level, considering my limited time to do such things.
Because there’s no easy way to get the already set up server stuff or files to be copied off the server, the only thing I can think of to do is to use one of Susan’s external HDs for backing those up before I reformat. But Susan is very touchy about Anyone Making Her System Wonky, so I’d better wait until she’s home.
Right now, she badly needs a backup system for her photo work - both the originals and the scans and the messed-with results - and her Christmas present of a terabyte worth of external USB HD would do that just fine. However, she has yet to install the thing due to - well, Mere hanging off her like a lamprey. MOMMY mommy mommy.
For backup purposes, Susan wants software that is totally Reliable and totally Behind the Scenes. Her ideal would be something that wouldn’t require her to have to think about doing a backup (totally automatic) AND never gets in her way whenever she is using the computer.
I’m not so sure that’s really possible. Or, more accurately, I don’t think much of incremental backups (too hard to find things you need Right Now), and I don’t like depending on the system to always do it for you - I prefer deals where you set up the backup and go off and Do Something Else, and you aren’t getting in the way of the thing doing all that file processing. If I want my system defragged, or seriously virus-checked, or I’m making a slew of DVD ISOs, or I’m doing some kind of massive file massage of any sort, I’ve found over and over again that the best way to do things is to Leave The Durn System Alone and Let It Do Its Thang without trying to do other stuff on it at the same time. Run things overnight, or while I’m away from the house, or whatever.
Aside of that, it’s Scanning and processsing paperwork time. When the refinance is done, we’re getting me a new scanner with a document feed to speed things up….