Acronis True Image costs performance when not used
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This is perhaps the most surprising sentence in this article. A proprietary software company sharing debugging symbols (which are basically the closest thing to source code that isn't source code) when you just ask their support about an issue is something that I'd never expect to happen.
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.
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.
There's no winning here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- the Windows icon cache is dependent on the display configuration (in particular, bit depth, and maybe pixel density)
- unplugging a monitor therefore flushes the icon cache
- the relevant file is an explorer icon overlay handler (which is identified by the registry key one needs to mitigate the problem)
- therefore flushing the icon cache causes a mass refresh
- the handler is probably looking to see if some True Image process is running †
- maybe it needs that to show different icon overlays?
- it's probably also doing that for every icon (i.e. the caching isn't happening across different icons, at least when the cache is flushed)
† in hind sight, this is better done via a named pipe or mutex or something
(Edit: added line breaks)
In what way?
The latter is the default since it's more flexible and requires less space when doing incremental backups AFAIK, but obviously isn't a true image.
I have no clue what vendors do this, especially MS themselves. Has the exact look of files that were installed by a virus.
https://www.easyuefi.com/backup-software/backup-suite-free.h...
Good to know and damn, that sucks. I'm still on 8, and I've felt zero need to move on, so I didn't know they'd done that.
I had installed it and planned to use it, but had not set it up - and yet it was using cpu daily.
stopped using.
I would agree with another commenter Veeam's free offering is a great backup choice as long as you have a computer you want to backup separate from your computer doing the backing up.