Well yeah, I mean not always but for probably 20 years their laser printers have been terrible, and their inkjets have been not consumer friendly for even longer than that.

For instance, I once had an HP color laser printer that was designed in a way that toner dust would build up on the prism and mirror, causing streaks and splotches to be printed on the page. The official recommendation was to buy a new printer, and the local repair shop said is it even though it’s a known issue and they’re capable of fixing it, getting it apart and putting all the pieces back together is such a time consuming hassle that it would be just as cheap to buy a new one. A $300 color laser printer. If I did it successfully, I would need to do it again in a year or two anyway. I now have a Brother; it’s black and white only but has been rock solid.

I did see on The Other Site a discussion from a year or two ago that Brother isn’t so great anymore, but the consensus seemed to be that they’re still better than anything other than maybe those Epson printers with the ink reservoirs.

I remember that my high school, college, and first couple of jobs had amazing HP laser printers, but sadly those days are gone and the company is a shell of what it used to be. I would not buy an HP printer at this point.

Sorry for your suffering but welcome to the club.

We are talking about a code editor, not a whole operating system!

/s

Oh yeah, good point! I have file versioning turned on, too, so if I do need to roll back a file, SyncThing probably has a good copy.

I use a combination of technologies.

I keep most of my documents in sync between all my computers with SyncThing. It’s not a true backup solution, but it protects me from a drive failing in my desktop or someone stealing my laptop.

My entire drive gets backed up locally to a external hard drive using Borg. That provides me with the ability to go back in time and backs up all of my large files such as family photos and home videos.

Important documents get cloud backup with Restic to BackBlaze B2. Unfortunately, I don’t want to pay for the storage capacity to save all of my photos and videos, so those are a little less protected than they should be, but B2 gives me the peace of mind that my documents will survive a regional disaster like flooding or fire.

I use both Borg and Restic because I started with Borg many years ago and didn’t want to lose all of my backup history, but can’t use it with B2. I used to use one of the unlimited cloud single-computer solutions like Mozy or Carbonite but have multiple computers and their software was buggy, then they increased the price significantly. When I switched to B2, I found Restic worked well with it. I think they’re both solid solutions, but the way Restic works and the commands make more sense to me.

I have a lot of photos that I take. Amazon Photos gives me unlimited storage to back them all up, but it’s terrible. When Amazon Drive existed, I could grab a folder and drop it in the Photos area of Drive. My folder structure was maintained and it was easy to see what I’d already backed up or what else needed to be sent. Then Drive was discontinued and the only way to manage my photos is through the terrible web interface. There is no folder structure, putting photos in albums is unwieldy, and I have no confidence in the systems ability to give me back my photos if I needed to recover from data loss. Uploading a bunch of photos through the web page is slow and fails more often than not, leaving me to painstakingly figure out what went and what failed or just upload the whole thing again, creating duplicates. Most of the time, I can’t even find a photo or album I’m searching for. I hate that it exists and would fill a specific need if it wouldn’t have such a terrible interface.

I wish I’d have a friend who would share a few TB of storage with me but I’m pretty happy with my system, even though it has some gaps.

Wait, what the heck is BeReal? I’ve never heard of it before?

Does that mean I’m old now?

I upvoted you because I don’t award contracts, so I have no idea if that’s common practice but I hope your comment gets some visibility and discussion. It’s quite interesting to think about the value of our time or effort and how maximizing those isn’t a bribe, it’s just common sense.

Also what is the reason not to use the mariadb tool provided by borg?

I don’t know what tool you mean and can’t find any references online. I do see that Borgmatic allows hooks to run a program like mysqldump before a backup run, but it’s neither part of Borg itself nor has anything to do with streaming data, so I’m still confused about what tool you’ve found.

The advice you’ve gotten is good and it’s what I do. A cron job runs mysqldump, a different cron job runs borg, and I do error checking on both of those as well as occasional test restores.

is Apple Maps finally good?

No. Definitely not “good.” It used to be terrible and maybe isn’t so bad anymore, though.

For instance, around here there are a lot of private driveways; farming roads, dirt paths on private property, things like that. Apple would route me through those, I would mark them as not a road, they would be reviewed, and a month later they would reappear on the map. Why would I trust a map that jeeps trying to route me down a private washed out dirt path?

I was going to a meeting and typed in the address they provided. Apple popped up a location, but it was about an hour away in the wrong direction. It turns out that Apple didn’t know the correct address, so they helpfully corrected it to a different number, street, and city.

I needed to get to sports practice at a community center, so I put in the address. Apple took me to a literal empty field ten minutes away from the actual location.

If that’s the best they can do, why would I ever trust them? Maybe it’s better, but it was so bad for so long that I don’t even want to try it again.