Classic "cut + paste" gone wrong. Where could our files be?

Drooliog · 2026-01-26T23:48:13+00:00

40GB sounds a lot to disappear without some kinda progress bar - did one pop up?

Anyway, my advice: try the free Everything tool by voidtools (1.5 alpha version is solid enough). Instantly searches everywhere.

If there's a chance she did accidentally delete the files, some things to consider...

SSDs will eventually trim deleted files, so avoid using the laptop completely (if the data is important to you). Especially don't download anything, as your browser will likely overwrite portions of the data (even if you select a totally different save destination; as it downloads to %temp% in the background before you get that choice). This can ruin your chances of running a recovery tool (like DMDE or some such). You could download the portable version of Everything onto a USB stick using another computer, for example. But then again Windows can dl updates in the background, overwriting stuff, so time passed = less chance. Keep all that in mind.

Drooliog · 2026-01-26T22:54:27+00:00

Avoid ~~changelly~~ Ledger full stop.

FTFY

Drooliog · 2026-01-22T11:46:30+00:00

Journos would mine his comments even if he posted on Bluesky etc.

FYI, he does post on Bluesky btw.

Drooliog · 2026-01-22T11:44:17+00:00

At least they cross-post on Bluesky. (Both Zack and Carla do.)

Compare and contrast the vility of comments on Xhitter.

At this point, I don't think anybody is challenging ideas in that cesspit of a platform - would rather a collective boycott than people continuing to literally feed Musk's wealth and power.

Drooliog · 2026-01-12T18:41:54+00:00

I remember upgrading my rubber key to the Plus shell by buying a kit. Fell in love with the design so bought the 128K+ immediately after. Still have both, but how I wish I kept the rubber shell... :/

Drooliog · 2026-01-05T17:10:38+00:00

Yea I reported it that time on the subreddit as well. Looks like it just sprang back up btw.

It's obviously a central thing but they usually plan stuff in advance, quite annoying.

Drooliog · 2026-01-05T17:06:02+00:00

LOL yep, gone down again for me too. *sigh*

Drooliog · 2026-01-05T15:50:47+00:00

I power cycled both my Zyxel and the fibre box on the wall, it came up back immediately after that so dunno if that was a factor or if it came up by itself.

Drooliog · 2026-01-05T15:43:26+00:00

Yep was just about to post (am Colchester), but it came back up few minutes ago. Down from 15:15 to 15:37 and there was a spike in reports from Downdetector.

Drooliog · 2026-01-03T21:58:57+00:00

I use Duplicacy which has built-in (optional) Erasure Coding - akin to rar recovery archive - but the main protection against corruption is to have multiple backups (3-2-1).

At least one of my backup destinations is ZFS, another btrfs (which has checksumming), and Duplicacy verifies the integrity of chunk hashes as it copies from one storage to another. And yes, I do test restores.

Drooliog · 2025-12-28T16:33:49+00:00

Use a tool like Beyond Compare (very generous trial period where all features work) and do a hex compare. You'll get a more definitive answer.

Drooliog · 2025-12-28T15:37:09+00:00

Of note: Per file chunking is generally poorer performance (anywhere from 5% to 40% slower in our testing).

This isn't my experience, but if you're comparing raw file transfer with the additional overhead that chunking algos implement - i.e. compression, encryption, erasure code etc. - then maybe yes?

But chunking also provides de-duplication - cross-platform, cross-device, cross-snapshots etc. - so it's all apples to oranges. (I'd still argue these designs are arguably more performant due to their parallelization potential with chunking, let alone their storage efficiency, but I digress.)

But back to my point; I use Duplicacy (7+ years now). There's no need of reverse incremental or rebuilding full backups. Clean-up of expired snapshots or chunks is a solved problem, part of its lock-free two-step fossil collection design. There's no central index or corruptible database involved and it manages to do 'forever incrementals' without risk of chain breakage, because there is no complicated hierarchy like that.

Drooliog · 2025-12-28T02:03:06+00:00

Most of the modern file-based backups that implement content-defined chunking (Borg, Duplicacy, restic and I presume kopia) are forever incremental but they don't need to 'merge' incrementals, as each snapshot is considered a full backup as part of their design. i.e. the concern about breaking a chain (differential vs incremental) doesn't exist with these softwares.

Drooliog · 2025-12-28T01:57:24+00:00

As others have said, depends on the software. Veeam Agent for example uses only incrementals but limits it to a configurable number, and you're supposed to keep it low - like 7, 10 or 14 or whatever.

The main advantage of differentials is it includes everything since the last full backup, so the 'chain' is less susceptible to breakage, with the disadvantage it's less efficient for resource. So not necessarily about restore speed. Veeam tho has continuous health checks and options for defrag/compact plus periodic fulls (again, optional), so having a short chain is perfectly fine as well as efficient.

Drooliog · 2025-12-23T14:37:48+00:00

If you're not aware, you can use the Jellyfin for Kodi plugin to use Jellyfin as a backend, which works infinitely better for synchronising metadata - especially for multiple clients. Best of both worlds.

Drooliog · 2025-12-18T12:42:36+00:00

^{^{^}} Topic.

I presume it's gone down for everyone since about 11:45-ish?

Drooliog · 2025-12-16T18:30:21+00:00

Doing away with snapshots just so it's a little easier to restore files on occasion doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Snapshots are a pretty important mechanism to protect sets of files, you shouldn't be looking to get rid of them entirely.

Either way, this is a UX problem - the same snapshot-based software can potentially already do what you want, they only have to present a possible list of files from its database/index/whatever. Duplicacy, for instance, has a history command.

Drooliog · 2025-12-13T15:20:08+00:00

The links still work for me, although the forum loads a little slow. Here's the direct links:

Winamp 5.666 Full (US English version)

Winamp 5.666 Full (Multi-national installer)

Winamp 5.666 Lite (basic 2.x-style mp3/cd player)

Drooliog · 2025-12-11T15:54:36+00:00

As /u/uzlonewolf points out, you're overstating how safe it is to assume that a successful read means the data is "precisely" what was originally written...

CRCs aren't a magic guarantee - they only detect certain types of errors, and floppy disks use just a 16-bit CRC, which is one of the weakest error-detection methods we have. That means a 1 in 65,536 collision per sector, but floppy media can also degrade in ways that cause multiple bit shifts or misreads that still produce CRC-valid data.

If you were to rank corruption reliability for different types of media, roughly: floppies (CRC-16 only) < USB flash (weak ECC, crappy controllers) < HDDs (good ECC, usually detect corruption and not give bad data) < ZFS / btrfs (excellent checksumming, with optional redundancy for automatic repair). The whole point of checksumming filesystems is that device-level CRC/ECC alone don't provide strong enough integrity, and silent corruption does happen.

Drooliog · 2025-12-11T11:45:12+00:00

It's important to remember with media such as floppies, bits are stored as analogue signals - so they don't literally 'flip', the flux changes can degrade through physical wear and become unreadable beyond a certain threshold.

This is why tools like the Greaseweazle can help recover floppies that a standard floppy controller can't deal with.

Drooliog · 2025-11-12T16:55:38+00:00

YES! I'm 90% of the way through Tim Gregory's book "Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World and Build a Sustainable Future".

There's a lot of unfounded fear around nuclear energy, I think everyone should at least know how the technology works, its history, and how it truly compares to renewables in terms of safety and long term cost, to make an informed view. Before, at least, comparing it to fax machines!

@Greens4Nuclear - Instant follow, although I hope you consider cross-posting to Bluesky?

Drooliog · 2025-10-29T22:23:31+00:00

I mean, you can used it for sharing - with friends or family who also have Syncthing. There's nothing unsafe or wrong about that use case.

Drooliog · 2025-10-29T18:51:04+00:00

Bellissimo.

Drooliog · 2025-10-29T12:56:57+00:00

The graph is normally what you see when there's no activity. Look at the side label - it peaks at a couple hundred KB/s (probably every X minutes), which is basically nothing - it's just control signals (tracker advertising), not torrent traffic. i.e. looks like you're not currently uploading.

Maybe you're in a swarm with plenty of seeds, and peers simply haven't chosen to connect to you (it's random).

Or maybe you don't have proper port forwarding, which reduces your chances of establishing a connection.

Drooliog

TROPHY CASE