It Was Easy to Backup My PC Computer With Acronis 2018. It Was Much More Difficult to Restore From a Backup

It's been a frustrating week for my law firm's IT Department (I am my own IT department).  My generic desktop PC's ability to use Wifi stopped working. I tried various repairs, but after nothing worked, I decided to restore my computer a few days back with a backup program called Acronis 2018.  I had been diligently making backups for the past couple years with this program, but I was living in blissful ignorance. This week, I attempted a full metal-to-metal restore twice but it twice failed.  I was also confused by the entire Acronis process. It wasn't entirely clear to me how to make the boot disk or whether a boot disk was necessary.  For my third try, I contacted Acronis support.  No live people were available on a voice line unless you were willing to pay an additional $20.  A support person on a chat line had seen my several previous emails to Acronis discussing my concerns and questions, as well as my failures.

This person on the chat line walked me through the restore, step by step.  This took an hour.  After the restore was underway, he assured me that when it was finished, my computer would look exactly like it did when I last backed it up.  When the restore was complete, however, my PC screen read:  "RESTORE FAILED."   The Acronis people responded again when I reported this failure by email, but they were asking me to refer to computer logs when my computer would display one and only one screen: "RESTORE FAILED." No thanks. I had given up on Acronis, especially after spending 8 hours trying to get these restores to work. 

Luckily, Dropbox and Onedrive were working like champs, so most of my data was safe. But this episode was a big frustration for me.  My work around was to purchase an iMac. I appreciate Apple's Time Machine more than ever.  Easy to use and bulletproof.  And here are my words of warning.  If you buy a new backup program, find some way to test it before relying on it.  I don't know whether there actually a way to do a test restore.  I personally wouldn't want to mess with my PC like this. It takes too much damned work and if it fails, you'll be up shit creek without paddle.  I have used Time Machine on other Macs over the years, and it has been bulletproof.  Apple's Time machine is one of the most impressive apps out there.  That's where my money is now. 

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The Problem of False Positives When Trying to Protect Your Website From Spam Comments on a WordPress Site

I've been running Dangerous Intersection since 2006, which now offers more than 7,000 posts.  When you are not running your own website, there are a lot of things that you need not worry about.  Technical issues often arise, and I've been doing my own tech work on my site.  That sometimes means I need to spend significant time to figure out why a Wordpress configuration, a widget or a plugin isn't working correctly. DI has generated a lot of comments over the years, almost 30,000 comments to date. It occurred to me today that there haven't been any comments for weeks.  I carefully analyzed my WordPress setup and could not see any problem.  No issues, which is typical of Wordpress, which is an amazing (and free) website platform.

Then I moved to my anti-spam protection plugin, Askimet, which has done a great job over the years.  But not anymore.  Recently, Askimet has been improperly identifying ALL of my incoming comments (even my own comments) as spam.  I tried to figure out how to reconfigure, but couldn't.  I have no intention of scanning thousands of spam comments each day (many millions of spam comments over the years) in order to identify the real comments, manually pulling them out of the "spam" folder. Thus, I thought, "Maybe it's time for a new form of comment spam protection."

I did some research and decided to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam, a comprehensive program with a delightfully easy installation.  There is no Captcha involved.  I don't quite understand how they do it, but it CleanTalk is a wonderful system with rave reviews on Wordpress and more than 430,000 installations.  I'm not getting paid anything for recommending CleanTalk.  I am writing this with the hope that others who are frustrated with the deluge of spam comments that you get when you run a blog will appreciate this option.

I've been testing out CleanTalk for the past fifteen minutes and it's working like a charm.  CleanTalk is free for one year, then costs $8/year, which is more than reasonable, given how well the program works. I have no problem paying low prices for excellent services that will save me many hours over the year.

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We create technology and technology changes us.

I played guitar at a local coffee house last night ( Hartford Coffee ) In my haste to pack up to go, I forgot my electronic guitar tuner. Last night, then, I realized how dependent I have become on the tuner. I've played for many decades and, until 5 years ago, tuned by ear. I've fallen out of habit since then because these cheap tuners are incredibly accurate. All you need to do is watch the read-out--you don't even need to hear the guitar while tuning (one of my tuners attaches to the head of the guitar and picks up vibrations). I made it through the night, of course, but I found myself having to focus on what exactly the tuning problem was (which string or strings was out of tune, and which direction). People who don't play stringed instruments don't realize that even when you get the guitar tuned, it might not last for long. Even two songs later, it could require another adjustment. My point is that I had offloaded a skill to an electronic device. This is a common phenomenon these days. A lot of us don't know the phone numbers of our friends--no need to, with smart phones. Many of us are terrible spellers, but no problem, because the word processor will signal problems. My Google calendar and smart phone seem to organize me, rather than me organizing them. I find myself shooting out short texts and emails to get right to it, rather than calling, which requires some social graces--younger folks avoid calls like the plague, it seems. This makes me wonder whether they are thus losing some conversational skills. Robin Dunbar has researched the number of friends we have in our social group (it tends to be close to 150), but people who watch a lot of TV have fewer friends, and they might be losing the skills necessary to maintain a robust social group. This is not a criticism of technology. It can be immensely useful. For instance, I've used Meetup.com to connect with folks with keen interests in photography and urban exploring, people I would never have encountered without technology. My misplaced tuner last night reminded me that we create technology but that technology also changes us, for good and bad.

Continue ReadingWe create technology and technology changes us.