mystery dac

The new inexpensive Network Attached Storage boxes can be used to provide various types of offsite data backup. I'm going to take advantage of one of those approaches any day now. :-)

If you have a full version of Acrobat you can create an search index of all PDFs in a selection of locations. You can even leave a daemon running to automatically keep the index updated.

This is a full contents index and searching and browsing the results within acrobat is pretty fast and effective.

Of limited use for scanned documents, although acrobat can also OCR these to embed (for searching) what it thinks the text is while retaining the scanned images for display.

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Hello Winfield,

There is also the option of using your web host server. Mine is more than a thousand miles away, has several mirror sites and you can buy space by the GByte. It would take a major apocalypse to destroy their network and I guess then data retrieval wouldn't matter anymore. Since data sheets and app notes are publicly displayed anyway there wouldn't be a need for cumbersome encryption.

Regards, Joerg

Most of my programming. I get interrupted constantly at work (I bet you do, too!) and I can't program under those conditions. I also prowl the major semi mfrs web sites on a sorta regular basis to see what's new, my version of homework.

I keep all the company weekly backups in my cave, so I have everything that's released, plus the backups of the work-in-process drives. On a daily basis, I just carry files back and forth on a flash stick, and keep track manually, by file date.

I wonder why Windows file dates seem to be randomized by a few seconds; obvious identical copies never seem to have exactly the same times, usually a few seconds off.

Why doesn't Windows have a "copy only newer files" operation?

John

Don't you have all your PC's time-synced? I use a program called SocketWatch rather than M$... in fact I try to minimize my use of M$ programs ;-)

I use a program called FolderMatch to sync my PC and LapTop data files... when I travel and return it makes it a piece-a-cake to update both sides.

FolderMatch can work A -> B, B -> A, or A B by newest, or select your own scheme.

...Jim Thompson

What I meant, is that if I copy a file from a project folder to my flash stick, and later drag that same file back into its original folder (say, to make sure I haven't altered the one on the flash, working at home or something) the file timestamp isn't the same as the original one, even though nothing has been modified.

I use ebay time!

John

That's weird.

Careful with ebay... they may be like cable TV... twiddle actual time slightly skewed... for some reason I've yet to figure out why.

SocketWatch uses a variety of NIST-related servers, so that there's always at least one that's active.... it's showing 5 active servers available right now. It checks every 60 minutes (or more often if I want)... last correction was 38ms.

...Jim Thompson

Hello John,

DOS does :-)

I do not trust Windows with file transfers.

Regards, Joerg

Good plan, particularly when then the LFN->SFN translation needs to be kept. Window's registry is a nightmare.

Your question intrigued me, so I did a little research. I'm guessing you have NTFS on your hard drive and FAT32 on your flash drive.

NTFS has a time stamp granularity of 100ns and stores UTC. FAT32 has a time stamp granularity of 2s and stores local time.

So something is getting lost in the conversion.

It looks like if you copy it twice, the time is stable. Perhaps you should format your flash drive NTFS.

Alan Nishioka

Yeah, windows was always great at giving you a blank sector hear and there while copying data to a floppy drive with in windows. do it from DOS it would work fine.

Hello Jamie,

Just imagine, you copy a presentation, hop on a plane and when you get there it loads with the message "cannot read file" or "...has generated errors and will be closed". Never happened with DOS. Also, with DOS you can set verify. IMHO Windows has never reached the quality level of DOS.

Regards, Joerg

That's because IBM did the QC on DOS, and made Bill fix the bugs. Windows is pure Microsoft crap.

John

Hello John,

Whatever people might say about IBM one thing is for sure: They delivered top notch quality.

Unfortunately they also delivered what was IMHO a series of marketing blunders. The most sad one was when they threw in the towel on OS/2. That OS would have run circles around Windows and would have made them oodles of cash. However, by that time they had sent many of their more senior and thus wise employees into early retirement. I don't think that 'rejuvenation phase' was a good thing for them either. Is this what people learn in MBA classes?

Regards, Joerg

I don't know what kind of charmed life you've lived but I've had more floppy disks die unexpectedly than flash sticks. Floppys and DOS simply sucked.

-- Keith

Do understand that IBM was about to slip under the waves about that time. John Akers had been borrowing money to pay dividends for a decade, essentially robbing the future to keep his job.

I remember a promised marketing campaign that was guaranteed to "make our knees weak"; it was killed because the mucky-mucks decided it would cost $200M to mount a realistic advertising campaign. IBM never spent that much before. Yes, we did have weak knees (I gave up on OS/2 in 2001).

The problem is that there was no "rejuvenation phase". It was a downsize for survival phase. IBM has been really bad at "rejuvenation" since day one. It's been boom or bust, partially since they tried to keep senor people through the bad times.

-- Keith

That's exactly what rsync does; it works like a charm and by default uses a SSH encrypted channel. It takes seconds to update gigabyte-size directory tress when only a few files have changed.

Of course it's a free Unix command-line tool, available as source code. Maybe it's been ported to the glutton-for-punishment Windows world...

robert

IBM killed OS/2 early on when they insisted it continue to run on brain dead 286's because so many of their hardware customers had PS/2s with brain dead 286 processors.

They chose to support legacy hardware instead of legacy software.

I occasionally use 20 year old software I sure as hell don't use any 20 year old PC hardware. Very short sighted and stupid of them.

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No, that was a good decision at that point. They simply starved it to death.

Umm, PC hardware, particularly '286 based, wasn't 20 years old when that decision was made. It was better in *every* way than Windows, but died of child neglect.