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At work my data is backed up on a nightly schedule to a personal network folder on one of our build servers. That server has a 24TB external RAID array which collects these backups along with those from our other build machines. All of this is automated, and I receive an email every morning from the process with a summarized log.
I use two external drives to back up my home machine. The one drive contains a recent full backup and one or more differential backups courtesy of Macrium Reflect[^], which run automatically at night. The second drive is a 'mirror' backup data backup of everything on the machine that is neither Windows nor installed software. This one is updated using robocopy on demand, with an icon in the Start menu. Two clicks and it runs, and typically only takes a few seconds. This pair of drives gets swapped with a second pair fairly regularly. I'm reasonably confident that this scheme leaves me with less than a day's recovery time should something awful happen.
The mirror drives and one of the backup drives are SSD's. The remaining backup drive is a hard drive at the moment, but will be replaced fairly soon. I don't have hard data about the fragility of SSD's versus hard drives, but my personal experience has been for SSD's to be more physically robust.
I'm not willing to pay for 1-2TB of online 'cloud' storage for backups. This is not to mention the routine security breaches incurred by these services.
Software Zen: delete this;
modified 22-Dec-21 10:27am.
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I am in the process of setting up redundant backups, using the cloud and 2 local SSDs as well as regularly making a VM from my machine. I recently had a computer failure where my computer died, and somehow it managed to kill my backup flash drive which was attached at the time. All lost in a microsecond. Fortunately, the folks in my IT dept were able to retrieve the data off my computer. Lesson learned. An important thing going forward will be to always be redundant and keep updated with current tech. Remember all those floppy backups?
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SSDs are more likely to give no warning of failure and more likely to fail in ways where nothing is recoverable. But they are fast.
I don't know how much you have to backup, but cloud storage with a reliable company has the huge advantage of not having your backup lost to the same disaster (fire, flood, theft, asteroid, etc.) as the original. If you use Microsoft office, a family 365 plan gets you 5 terabytes of cloud storage (in five 1 terabyte chunks) in addition to perpetually latest Office Apps.
As for backup tools, I've tried or used most paid and free alternatives. Macrium Reflect is in a league of its own for home use. They have a version that's free for home use although the free version omits incremental backups. Incremental saves so much time and space (and bandwidth for backing up to cloud), it's well worth springing for the paid version after confirming you're happy with the free.
I don't even use virtual machines for testing or trials I can finish in a setting anymore. I run an incremental backup right before testing since an automated incremental was done not long before, that takes less time than getting a cup of coffee. Then I disable the drive I backed up to (Macrium software protects its own backups but I'm super cautious). Install what I want to test, do the test/trial and then restore from the incremental.
All backups run in the background off shadow-copies. Volume restores occur under PE environment. Volume backups can be mounted with or without write ability and can even be opened as virtual machines if your hardware is capable or you use compatible virtual machine software. So much more.
Check it out. No affiliation.
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Winter has been cancelled where I live (southern Ohio, U.S.) and it's all my fault.
I bought a Columbia winter jacket almost 30 years ago. It's washable and very warm. Unfortunately the end of the zipper has frayed can no longer be used. The snaps along the opening don't hold the jacket closed well enough.
I've retired the old jacket and bought a new one (Columbia, of course). For this reason, our temperatures have only dipped to the freezing mark a couple of times since I bought the new jacket.
Software Zen: delete this;
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If you're the cause, please set up a budget for an annual jacket purchase! My creaky old knees prefer warmer temperatures, and my new EV appears to hate the cold even more than my knees do - I lose 50-60 miles of range when the temperature drops below 35F.
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With the battery technology of today, reduced range in the cold is just something that you will have to accept. It is how battery technology is. Also, they charge a lot slower when temperature is low. So some cars use a little extra electricity to heat up the battery at the start of charging. Later on in the charging cycle, the charging produces enough heat loss to keep up the temperature, but without preheating of the battery, the first half hour won't get much power into that battery!
Norway is The EV Country - more than half of all new cars sold are purely electric, and the hybrids come on top of that. Typical winter temperatures are 5 to 10°C below zero (23F to 14F; right now, we are at 17F, -8.3°C around here). During cold waves, it can easily drop down to -20°C (-4F), or in the inland even to -40°C (-40F). So car magazines and websites all the time bring winter test reports of EV ranges. Loosing 50-60 miles is not at all surprising. At -20°C you should be happy if you get half the summer time range!
This is partly due to the batteries not liking low temperatures, but also also, unless you love to keep the car interior at -20°C as well, to the heater. And, on slippery roads, the anti-skid systems use extra power to keep the car on the road.
Traditionally, electric power has been cheap here in Norway. Gas prices have been at the same level as in the US - except that for a given amount, we get a liter, while in the US, you get a gallon  . So people buy EVs to save money. This winter is different: The shortage on natural gas in Europe (due to arguments with the largest supplier, Russia) has brought all sorts of energy prices to extreme levels: A couple days ago, the electricity price was only slightly below 1 USD/kWh in south Norway. So charging your electric car was more expensive than filling your diesel tank (for a given driving distance), even at Norwegian fuel prices!
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Inspired by what we do at work, I started to replace my old .png or simply add new .svg in lieu of icon in my own home app.
Wow, they are so sharp and crisp, great idea! 
Although.. downloading free SVG is harder... and the only free app I found to edit them, InkScape, while cuter than a few years ago, has a sort of a learning curve....
On the clearly annoying side those goddamn .svg don't show preview in the Windows explorer (ok they in fact do because I added Microsoft Powerpack but).. InkScape's .svgz doesn't! 
And neither .svg nor .svgz preview in Visual Studio (2022), I wonder if there is an app for that?! 🤔
EDIT
Haha, of course there is an app for that, SVG Viewer - Visual Studio Marketplace
EDIT2
Time, perhaps, to mention I have an updated version of an unmaintained svg2xaml in my GitHub?!  
modified 21-Dec-21 3:16am.
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Nice link...
I think I saw it before and dismissed VECTR right away because it is online.
But as I thought about it later (not VECTR in particular but about SVG editor) it looks like the designers at work are also using a web editor (I guess it help with work sharing), that might be worth a look after all!
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VS Code can view them. It makes it really convenient when developing with SVG
Real programmers use butterflies
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Nice! 
Mmm... is there an SVG Editor for VSCode btw?
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I don't know if there's an editor. I haven't looked for one, but if there is it won't be a visual editor.
Real programmers use butterflies
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ha, yes, silly me!
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nothing about our existence is a simulation, as cool as that sounds.
That is not to say that we were not engineered by other higher life forms - I believe this.
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The case for living in a simulation says that one of the following is true:
1. Ours will be the first civilization capable of creating such simulations.
2. Civilizations capable of creating such simulations don't do so.
3. You are almost certainly living in a simulation.
This seems to make #3 the front-runner--if you accept the premise that such simulations are possible. But maybe they're not. Getting the software right might be too hard, or running such simulations might require too many resources.
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We are all just bitcoins in the simulation that created our simulation.
It’s simulations all the way down!
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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I had a customer once who was very difficult, to put it mildly. We had to revise our system's scheduler to accommodate a change they thought they need to make to their process. This was a system that performed chemical processes on cassettes full of wafers. It turned out to be an unnecessary change that no one else in the industry used and they ended up abandoning it themselves a few years later. Anyway, we had to provide them with a simulation of our system and they spent weeks running it to verify the processing steps. I still vividly remember this customer, in a rather heated discussion, exclaiming, "but the simulation is real!"
That still makes me chuckle. 
FWIW, this was in the late 1980s and they were just making the transition from using aluminum for interconnections to using copper and they were afraid the copper would corrode if left in rinse tanks too long. As it turns out, it will but you have to leave the cassettes in the rinse tank a very long time but we usually didn't do that. I won't go into the changes we had to make to the process since they were removed in the next version anyway. One piece of trivia: that was for IBM when they were second-sourcing the 80286 for Intel.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Do children who don't learn to tie their shoes end up on Santa's knotty list?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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And where do those hang (around) who can't tie their ties 
modified 20-Dec-21 11:18am.
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Yup, and those children who don't wipe their noses end up on his snotty list.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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I don't recall hearing about a snotty list, but I've heard of a shite list, which still works.
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Greg Utas wrote: shite list
My mom claims I was on it more often than not. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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