Data backup has been, well, something. While working on the NAS, I’ve been figuring out how much data we have to backup and where to put it. It was in the middle of this where I found out that the freezing I’ve been experiencing on my PC was most likely due to one of two things:
- A whacked out file somewhere in the large mess of directories and files or
- the backup drive I was trying to copy file over to/from
I zeroed in on the drive and started using Konsole to copy but holy hell, even rsync froze the computer. Jesus, wtf?
I did some research and found that freezing while copying large amounts of files can be attributed to a bad disk – and for some reason I’d ignored the fact that this large USB backup drive is well over ten years old. Guess I needed to check it for errors and, well, smartctl wouldn’t pick up anything about this old drive at all, so eeeek. At this point I don’t even know how it was managing to spin its platters. All I knew was Linux wanted all but nothing to do with it.
I plugged the damn thing into the old Windows 10 laptop we have that’s doing nothing but being an interim Plex server (until I get a NAS up and running, which is a story on its own) to see if I could find out anything and Windows complained that “This disk has errors, please fix”. I let it do its thing and everything worked out enough for me to move data off that old drive onto the SSD on the laptop – which is now being copied over to the secondary drive on my desktop (by way of the temporary TrueNAS Core machine). Convoluted? Sure. But, as they say, it is what it is for now.
Speaking of Windows. The aforementioned laptop is an old Dell, i5 that I put a new SSD drive in. It runs Windows 10 which has been fine. Yesterday I turned it on and it took its time updating, like Windows does, and it eventually landed here:
What the absolute shit is this? A few more services, eh? I really, really dislike this “oh! they must have all the things connected all the time!” mindset.
I clicked Remind me in 3 days (because of course they won’t make a button that’s labeled: “No, never. Absolutely not ever in a million years do I want to connect to more of your services, even if it’s just a few”. That would take up the whole bottom of that screen and it would look yukky design wise) and it put me at the login screen. I logged in…
.. And there was a Copilot button next the the Start menu.
I just can’t with this AI shit. At least I could uninstall it. No matter. Once all the file copying and NAS setup is done, this old laptop is going to be introduced to Linux.
Goddamned Phone
GrapheneOS update: I got one of my work apps sending notifications. I really wish I could move to this full time, but I just can’t at the moment.