Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

SafeDocs : Came across this short writeup of the new backup utility to be included in Vista called SafeDocs. What I want to know is whether or not it will syncronize my documents folder with a folder on a network volume. [Update: I'm pretty sure it won't. From what little additional info I've been able to gather from the MS web site, PC's on a network should just work from a network volume. SafeDocs is for folks not on the network. What about mobile users with intermittent access to their network volumes?]

In my opinion, backing up to a network volume (itself backuped by sysadmins) is the only thing that makes sense. Mirroring to a secondary HD is also good. Writing to CD or DVD, though, is not going to happen, especially since the trend seems to be towards minimalist file management (i.e. just dump your files wherever and use Foo's Desktop Search to find what you are looking for).

Even on my puny laptop I have a 20GB HD and only 1GB of storage on the network server. 1GB is good, but it isn't enough for me to run hands-off backups/mirroring of my data every day. I don't back up music or photos (music, I own the CDs, and photos, well, the good ones I upload to flickr)

The effective space of our hard drives is equal to the space we have for backups. Mine is 1GB. Yours?