digdilem

"I know you are, but what about the critic?"

Of course it is.

Crayons would have been a much better analogy.

You can't explain it to them. Not even by using toy cars or gobstoppers.

"There's none so deaf as those who will not listen"

Theoretically accurate - Privacy advocates have long been arguing against cloud services for privacy and security reasons, although not many will have predicted the current state of affairs.

And don't forget US manufactured routers, carriers and other hardware, as well as client software and handheld devices.

Hopefully some of the 87 million eligible voters who stayed at home in the 2024 elections might have realised that voting does matter, and does change their life.

I'm not going to answer your question directly - others have done that already.

I will say that, as an older man, my brain has thrown up random things from my childhood multiple time, so the same may happen for you. I'm no psychologist, and I'm also late-diagnosed autistic, but it seems that the brain can lock away memories from that period because it didn't know how to process them. Then, much later in life, it'll dig one up, dust it off, and put it at the forefront of your mind and say, "Go on then, you're all grown up and know so much now, what about this then?"

This has happened to me at times of trauma (like I didn't have enough to deal with at that time already - and may be the same for you with your OCD), but also at times of peace. I had a traumatic childhood which I won't go into, but it's provided a rich seam of suppressed and painful memories to randomly spit out and obsess over throughout my life.

I think my point in writing this is... Just to say that you're not alone in having random thoughts from your past take over, and that overall I don't think it means much that it's come back to mind.

This is what I don't understand about Americans.

You literally have a large percentage of your population who carry guns and prepare for civil war because you don't trust your government or police. Yet here we are, with every sign an indication that exactly what these people have prepared for is actually happening and... where are they?

We're seeing lots of peaceful protests, but where are the nutters?

ChatGPT

You're welcome.

Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that's just "tree" to produce a list of directories and files (I don't know about Windows, sorry)

But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you're on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you're thinking about it before you need it, that's good!

A pet subject of mine.

Firstly - sit down and consider what you need to backup.

• Tier 1 - unique data. Stuff you created that doesn't exist elsewhere.
• Tier 2 - Stuff that would take a few days to repeat. Local configs, etc.
• Tier 3 - Stuff you can just download again. (Steam library, media etc)

Don't backup Tier 3. I'm betting the size of data you need to back up shrinks a lot.

Secondly - automate it. If there's anything manual, then you'll eventually stop doing it. Automate, automate, automate - and throw in some manual or automated checks of the backups to verify they're actually usable.

Thirdly - airgap it if you can, and if there's much Tier 1 data. Offline disks. This gives you some protection against ransomware. Consider the risks and how to protect yourself. Obviously media failure, accidental deletion and ransomware, but also consider theft and fire. Do you really want your backups in the same location? Do they need encryption?

I wrote quite a long blog on the subject if you're interested in more.

His interfering with European politics is despised over here - promoting far-right groups in Germany, France and the UK deliberately to destabilise our countries. The man is genuinely dangerous to all democracies, not just the US.