Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key

It still does not detract from the point - That novices should not be encrypting... That sh*t will indeed happen, that they will come to one like me, and I will get to tell them their drive is bricked and I can't help them.

I'd agree with you given the state of tech these days for desktops. It should be better than what it is though. I lay the blame for the pitiful state of cryptography on the vendors. It should all be completely seamless to the users, but it is not. It's always a complex mess that your average Joe isn't able to use effectively. Hell, most folks I know can't even handle the concept of organizing files in directories. Done correctly though, they shouldn't have to.

Even in regard to backup - I would recommend the same thing. Back up raw files. Uncompressed. unencrypted. At least two backup chains. Storage is cheap. Data is priceless.

HA! I'd be happy to see folks use any type of backup. Most are so clueless it's not even funny, even with Macs, where it is absolutely brain dead simple with Time Machine (the way it ought to be done). I'm pretty religious about my backups. I have a local backup using BackInTime (which is almost as easy to use as Time Machine) that runs nightly., then use rsync to cut the occasional copy that gets archived to a safe deposit box. I'm still using the same bookmark file I started with on Netscape back in the day. Unfortunately you now have to do an import/export operation with firefox to generate and load it when necessary, but the only thing that has let me maintain it, is that I'm pretty religious about backups.

Same here - Never have liked Apple's ecosystem... I prefer Linux - Though as a Residential/SOHO service tech, it is necessary for me to keep myself in Win/Office, so my main machines tend to be windows... One day I'll hang up my pocket protector, and I won't need samba anymore ; )

Thankfully, I no longer have to support windows-anything. The closest I come is my corporate laptop which has Win7 on it. First thing I did was install vmware on it, so I could have a VM to run Linux for real work.

Cheers!

Hell, most folks I know can't even handle the concept of organizing files in directories.

There ya go. Me, I'd go the other way - I wish things were still stored on fat32 - Too simple, I know - and not very secure... But I can recover fat32 like nobody's business. WAY easier than on a journaling system.

I think simpler systems are better - complication is just more stuff to break and more vulnerabilities... With the exception of banking information (which should be in an encrypted container by design) and reasonable measures against viruses and trojans, If you are behind a router, you're really pretty safe. The average user doesn't need all the bells and whistles, and has a hard enough time just figuring out the basic stuff.

It's something inherently wrong in how the modern OS is made. It should be modular and begin with a very simple but bulletproof core OS... even just a console. Then, according to need, add on more modules, more complexity... Linux is very capable of this approach, though it is seldom employed. Most people will never use 80% of the capability built into Windows... Why have it there?

HA! I'd be happy to see folks use any type of backup. Most are so clueless it's not even funny

It is my constant bane. Normally folk's won't care until they get bit... Then I get to turn my collar around and preach it... while the pain is fresh, I rub on it. Then I get to school them. Then they listen and learn.

I'm pretty religious about my backups. I have a local backup using BackInTime (which is almost as easy to use as Time Machine) that runs nightly., then use rsync to cut the occasional copy that gets archived to a safe deposit box.

Most of my stuff is too big to do manually - But I have a standing server... I'm using Cobian Backup for the heavy hauling. Each machine backs to the server. That server backs up internally to 'Deep Blue' which is a raided pair... And also backs to my main media server (runs my TV/music in the living room/always on too). My Development/coding gets backed up that way, but also is mirrored across three machines manually using FreeFileSync.

You might like FreeFileSync better than RSync. It's cross-platform and seriously excellent in it's include/exclude method. Setting up a batch for automation is super easy, and it is deadly fast at the actual work. And still pretty easy to use manually.

I'm still using the same bookmark file I started with on Netscape back in the day. Unfortunately you now have to do an import/export operation with firefox to generate and load it when necessary, but the only thing that has let me maintain it, is that I'm pretty religious about backups

In a Win configuration, I move my firefox profile into %UserProfile%\Archives\Firefox ... There's a .js I can apply to move the FF cache to C:\Temp\Firefox, and then I can include the entire profile in my backup routine. That's how I got around the import/export thing for bookmarks, and you have the added benefit of backing up your addons and etc... pretty groovy. Works for Thunderbird/Lightning too.

Rsync works fine. Pretty efficient for any files that haven't changed. The offsite is just a sync of /home/ /var/www and /etc. Nothing else is really important.

As to the modular systems, you're dead on with that. Personally, I'd like to see Linus say, "no more" for about 3 years, and spend that time doing nothing but patching. Too much is changing right now for my tastes.

Regarding fat32, no way bro. I understand what you mean about ease of recovery, but that's what backups are for. I want a journaled FS that can handle badness more reliably. I haven't had an ext3 or ext4 FS eat itself yet, so I'm pretty happy with that. I remember doing some low-level stuff with FAT back in the day, when I was first learning how all this stuff worked. Had a hex editor that would actually let you do sector-level edits directly on the disk. DOS was great that way. A friend and I played around with hiding data in slack space, and editing filenames that couldn't be accessed through normal means. It was all pretty fun in its way. To this day, I recall that to delete a file in DOS, all you had to do was change the first character to a hex "E5". Was undeleting stuff before there were actually tools out there to do it for you. Saved my bacon more than once.

Things are a bit different now. I have audio files bigger than my first hard disks. Back then, even on the minicomputers I worked on professionally, I couldn't have imagined a 5TB drive, or multi-GB of RAM, much less having that kind of stuff for less than a grand in inflated dollars.

We'll rue the day, though, that we committed so much of our stuff to proprietary formats. Will computers know how to decode jpeg a hundred years from now? I really don't know. Probably, but I doubt they'll know what to do with a MS-Word file. So much stuff will be lost to bit rot, that it boggles the mind.Most of it will be unimportant, but a lot of it won't. Consider, you can buy tintypes or degerrotype of civil war soldiers way more than a hundred years old, and can read court records from the 1700s. What will we be able to read in 2200?

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