Good morning!

One piece of software I've depended on for ages is USBDLM, which in effect allows you to decide the drive letter to be assigned to particular USB storage device when it's plugged into a machine. The last time I installed this service, Montaigne was running Windows 8, so perhaps its behavior was "grandfathered" when I upgraded to Windows 10.

I've installed the software on Yquem, which has been running nothing but Windows 10 since "day one" and have devoted enough time to trying to make it work—frankly, not a whole lot—to make me rethink the wisdom of applying much more effort in this direction (and since the developer's site says nothing about Windows 10 compatibility, well... that's icing on the cake).

It's probably a good thing that I not (re)create a system that depends on the presence of certain external devices.

Cheers...

Rectocranial inversion...

I have obviously been a bit "out of it" as far as knowing what is worth backing up on one's hard drive.

The best approach—seconded by Natalie—is to make recoverable images from time to time. (Indeed, had Montaigne's hard drive not gone flaky on me, that's what I would have done.)

It would appear that my view of the world as consisting of OS and DATA (the respective names of the partitions I created on Montaigne's hard drive after I acquired the machine) is not so clear cut. The AppData that Microsoft nestles away in one's user folder appears to be nothing but data.

It's where, for example, Thunderbird squirrels away all of my mail, for one thing.

So for most of the day, while I've been slaving over a hot translation, I've been using something called Midnight Commander on my Linux laptop to copy files from Montaigne's drive to a plain-vanilla USB drive.

Midnight Commander has the advantage of not soiling itself (i.e., quitting without telling you why) if it tries to copy an unreadable file. Instead, among other options, I can elect to skip said file, whereupon the program will pick things up with the next file to be copied. So far, I think I've had to skip fewer than a dozen files, all of them with incomprehensible names that suggest they were temporary to begin with.

The thing that really blows me away about AppData?

So far, Midnight Commander has copied 65 GB of files!

Taking notice of things...

Over the past few days, I've been particularly aware of a certain type of person—to wit, the individual driven to have "the last word." I've noticed this often enough before, but became acutely aware of the phenomenon at the conclusion of two phone conversations (with different people) and just now, in an email exchange.

Moi, I am not so driven, but I do wonder... what happens when two such individuals interact? (My brain immediately responds with "Alphonse and Gaston" and recalls their comedic interplay, but perhaps there is a better image?)

My disappointment with the search feature in Windows Explorer was reinforced just now. I had been looking for the installation file for FineReader 12, and I recalled that the file name began with "FR12" but searching for that turned up no files on any of my USB drives.

On my Linux laptop, I proceeded to successively pipe a recursive directory listing through grep and found the blessed thing, but knowing the file is on the drive is a far cry from knowing where on the drive it is, so I plugged the drive back into Yquem, opened up a command window, piped a recursive directory listing to a text file, and then searched for "FR12" in that file.

On the one hand, why did Windows not find the file in the first place?

On the other, bingo! I had found the installation file!

I've gotten a great deal accomplished this weekend, both in terms of recovering from the failed disk and catching up on translation work. I am not quite where I need to be as far as the latter is concerned, but I'm hoping I'll squeak by.

Getting up early tomorrow morning will help in that direction.

Cheers...

Sweet sixteen!

I know where I was 16 years ago today (at least, for part of the day): I was in front of my computer signing up with LiveJournal!

How time flies!