[kg]

Windows ends up being a thousand cuts situation when you have enough software like this installed. If you want a responsive and stable system you end up spending a good amount of time troubleshooting freezes or mystery CPU/disk usage.

As of yesterday (this started suddenly) any time Backblaze is performing a backup my whole system gets bogged down for no reason. Was fine days ago, so who knows what automatic update for what app caused it. It's probably an interaction with some other filesystem filter on my system, like Defender or Acronis True Image (which I am stuck using since every other disk imaging tool I've used is worse). Seeing this post on the front page has me wondering whether it's actually Backblaze's fault or it's Acronis, now...

I've previously tracked down random system freezes caused by some part of the NVIDIA driver interacting with one of my monitors, where the first unlucky process on my system to call certain graphics APIs after a boot or wake-from-sleep would cause the video driver to hold a lock and enumerate display modes for 10+ seconds. The end result was a "frozen" PC still responding to input, just unable to send new pixels to any of its displays. The fun part of that one was that profiling would blame these freezes on whatever user mode process was unlucky enough to make that graphics API call - Steam's browser overlay, Visual Studio's WPF rendering, the list goes on. The troubleshooting process for this one was expensive because I got to the point of replacing components before I figured it out.

I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins. My experience using linux on servers and VMs has had some situations like this but I don't know whether the everyday experience just running Linux or OS X on bare metal is actually perfect at this point.

[perching_aix]

> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins

Friend of mine dailies Arch. He described a few days ago a situation where he stopped being able to take screenshots from one day to the other, eventually finding out the root cause thanks to this fix: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/4127

Whenever Linux package management and shared dependencies are mentioned, people always seem to be quick to mention how it's good for security that you can upgrade dependencies without the consent and knowledge of the developer of each software you're using. To me, issues like this come to mind instead. Or how I heard multiple times acquainted developers complain that packagers modified their software downstream and broke it in some ways, only for users to come complain to them instead of to the distribution.

There's a recent(?) trend of circumventing distro repos and static linking things though, and I work with Go software pretty often, which I believe static links by default: they're a joy to deploy and use. Just nice, single, self-contained binaries. But it's really not the "one true Linux way" from what I can tell, so I'd imagine it's pretty against the grain, which should tell you a lot about the situation overall. I know I'm not itching to switch, and these are only a sliver of my gripes too.

[ninkendo]

> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins.

IMO these issues occur any time you have third party software that does the job the operating system should be doing itself. Backup/snapshot software (this should be a feature of the file system), clipboard software (the OS clipboard should cover these needs), hot key software, window management, “anti cheat” (or really anything that needs to be a kernel module), antivirus, antimalware, the list goes on.

A properly architected system should have an operating system in charge of managing apps and resources and hardware, and apps which mind their own business. Cross-cutting “horizontal” stuff like what Acronis is doing here are reimplementing things your OS should be doing, and thus aren’t tested along with the OS itself, and are bound to have issues like these.

Or you run macOS and the first party stuff is so buggy (spotlight I’m looking at you) that you’re screwed either way.

[oezi]

Explorer extensions such as the dlls which set the overlay icons used by Google Drive, OneDrive, Git, SVN, etc. are notoriously buggy. We want programmers to provide these extensions, but the documentation is bad and the interfaces are hard to program (measured by the amount of crashes caused by even a Google authored tool). I think Microsoft should have provided a test suite for these implementors to run or a certification program.

[lmz]

Lock the system -> get sued (or at least abused) for locking out third party utility writers. Leave the system open for extension -> poorly written apps by others ruin your reputation. Add telemetry to detect what third parties are doing -> privacy complaints.

There's no winning here.

[Dylan16807]

Microsoft got in trouble for having double standards in their locks, not for having locks at all.

The complaints I see for Apple generally revolve around not letting normal programs run. Also the way they crippled their firewall settings and gave certain processes a special bypass.

But honestly that's pretty beside the issue here. Programs should be able to interact with icons, but it needs to be sandboxed.

[7bit]

Try Veeam for Windows. It's free and it will not get more light weight that this. Tried Acronis last 15 years ago and they went from amazing to bloated and slow and terrible. I assume it still is.

[kg]

Spent an hour trying to get Veeam to work and it can't connect to an agent installed on the same machine. Sigh. Thanks for the suggestion though.

[7bit]

You added too many steps.

For personal use of backing up othe local computer you ONLY need Veeam Agent for Windows Free. You install it and then configure your backup.

The step where you took a wrong turn was probably to also install Veeam Backup and Replication? That's basically the orchestrator, but you only need this in an enterprise environment where you have multiple servers to backup. In that scenario you can use the same Agent to backup standalone Windows Servers or Computers.

But in your case that is not needed. You install the Agenda and use just that to backup to (ideally a ReFS) disk or SMB share. I can only suggest to retry it. With ReFS and the forever incremental backups are very, very fast.

[yrxuthst]

You don't need anything besides the agent if you're just using it for a single computer. The agent can back up to a drive or network location without being connected to the backup repository.

[_mlbt]

Clonezilla is another alternative. I haven’t used it in years, but it used to be pretty good.

[Arch-TK]

Software is crap everywhere. But on Linux I have the tools to quickly track down the bug and fix it, on windows I can maybe slowly track down the bug and attempt binary patching of proprietary software or hope and pray the developers will fix it after I beg them.

This is a privileged position as I am both a Linux expert, and an expert software engineer, and an expert troubleshooter/debugger. If you are not these things then I'm sure things don't work as well.

[idiomat9000]

Operating system kernels should be modal, with a performance mode, a maintenance mode, a server mode and a developer mode. Program cache eviction depending on the programs mode of belonging in the machines situation.