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Macrium Reflect did much the same thing as Adobe Elements. The difference was in the presentation.

Paramount Software (Macrium Reflect’s vendor) is clear about what is a subscription and what is a perpetual license. No three-year term licenses, but a “lifetime discount” for converting perpetual Reflect 8 licenses to subscription Reflect X licenses. Whether this is a fixed rate forever, or could vary when the next Reflect version comes out is unclear from what the site says. But the pricing is attractive. (This may have been a Black Friday deal, so the pricing may have changed.) I see no slowing down of product improvement with Macrium Reflect X vs. its predecessors.

Adobe is not being honest in this way. They are saying that just because renewals are after three years and some program functionality will continue after that time, the licensing is not a subscription. I am not a business lawyer, so I won’t argue over the language used. But the arrangement, while a bit different from Reflect X is in many ways essentially the same. You can still restore from backups using the old Reflect 8 or Reflect X after you stop paying for the subscription, but you can’t make any new backups. Similarly, you can use the Adobe organizer after the license term expires, but you can’t use the editor. (Although, the editor is probably the part of the program most users are interested in.)

For those who don’t want a backup product which is on a subscription model, I have heard good things about EaseUS ToDo Backup.

-- rc primak

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Steve S.

If anyone thinks free software is an alternative, remember — unless the software is collecting data on you and reselling it, there is no revenue stream to insure future availability, support or development.

One reason companies have gone to subscription models is that between support and development costs, the perpetual licenses weren’t being upgraded consistently enough to justify the cost of providing the software. If you haven’t talked to actual software developers or people who’ve worked for commercial software companies, you may not understand what these companies are up against.

-- rc primak

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Noel Carboni, Will Fastie, teuhasn2

“portable” versions of programs in Windows plus “flatpaks” in Linux.

Flatpak is not comparable to portable apps.

AppImages in Linux are portable apps not requiring installing a framework to run, and not using as many shared libraries. Flatpak is (along with Snap) a framework within which to run containers or virtualized programs, sandboxed and often with their own file systems.  Portable apps and AppImages use the OS’s native file system and do not have as much inherent sandboxing. Getting data from within Flatpak and Snap file systems to and from the Root file system is often quite challenging.

AppImage does fit the analogy with old disk-resident programs. Flatpak does not.

-- rc primak

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TechTango

“resistant to corruption and damage, and able to maintain data integrity despite such errors.”

The ability to recover from these errors is also called fault tolerance. Resilience gives more emphasis to resisting corruption in the first place. Both terms apply to modern, advanced file systems like ReFS, btrfs and ZFS. Chromebooks also make use of dual Root file systems, each one backing up and updating the other. A companion term is “immutable”, meaning that the working Root file system is never changed until its companion is updated. These techniques improve resiliency and fault tolerance.

Likewise, native NTFS drivers (NTFS-3G and NTFS3) are available for Linux, but with varying degrees of kernel compatibility and support, depending on specific distributions in use.

I noticed this issue of varying degrees of Linux kernel support for NTFS when Mint was upgrade from Victoria (21) to Wilma (22). Like Ubuntu in their 24.04 release, Mint Wilma upgraded to a much more recent Linux kernel than its predecessor. Suddenly, USB interfaced NTFS partitions on external SSDs couldn’t be trimmed, unmapped or discarded the way they could be under previous kernels. This is referred to in Linux as a regression. The same NTFS-3G FUSE utilities and commands were available. Such regressions are different from deprecations, such as the recent removal of ReiserFS support from the Linux kernel. (BTW, I prefer to let Windows do the trim operations for NTFS partitions, because Windows developers actively support all the features of NTFS.)

MiniTool Partition Wizard (MTPW) is also one of my favorite tools for dealing with partitions, especiallly in mixed systems where there are both Linux ext4 partitions and Windows NTFS partitions. It pairs nicely with Macrium Reflect for backup and cloning of partitions. Much faster than most Linux tools like Clonezilla and gParted.

-- rc primak

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AlexEiffel

There used to be talk of patents not being granted because their subjects were “too obvious”. What’s the story about that aspect?

I do know that a patent can be ruled “overly broad”.

-- rc primak

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ibe98765

I guess I got lucky (actually I did my research) when buying my Intel-based Chromebook. When it reached end of updates I was able to go to iFixit, order a few tools and replace the battery, then remove the write-protect screw. A few Root Terminal steps later I had a Linux laptop, albeit with hardware resource limitations and no internal sound.

My point is, a little research and paying extra for quality internal components can pay off in the long run. But a Chromebook is and always will be a Chromebook, and shoehorning Linux into it will never be a perfect fit.

-- rc primak

Susan Bradley wrote:

Such devices die. I like laptops to be self contained

Internal storage hardware die too.

One thing you have to be aware of in cheap, low-performance laptops and Chromebooks is that they often don’t use real SSDs. They instead use SD-Card style eMMC, which has a much shorter lifespan than NVME NAND SSD storage. And the eMMC storage is not replaceable or expandable internally.

-- rc primak

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Sueska

Storage isn’t a problem as users can connect external SSDs/HDDs the size of tens of TBs.

With Windows installations running up to nearly 100GB depending on what software and user data you leave on the system drive, internal storage for portable and small laptop devices is becoming an issue. Even 250GB inside my Intel NUC is beginning to feel a bit cramped. Having to redirect folders and links like My Documents to secondary or external drives is inconvenient but can be done.

Because there’s no external interface devices…

All NUC mini-PCs have ports to interface with external devices. That’s always been part of their design. Chromebooks however, only have two USB-C ports, one of which is often in use for charging.

Geekom and SimplyNUC are among the primary vendors for NUCs and similar form-factor mini-PCs.

-- rc primak

Another thing which the last two or three generations have done is to stop using desktop and laptop computers. Since they do everything on a phone, all backups are data backups to the Cloud. And since phone screens are small, nearly all phone apps have simplified user interfaces with few options and severely limited display areas.

Yahoo Mail is rolling out a change in their web interface for everyone, no matter which device you are using. The reading pane is unusable. The main view is severely crowded left to right. These are all concessions to the fact that the vast majority of email users (all two of us!) are accessing their mail on a phone.

For now you can revert to the old Yahoo Web Mail user interface, but that option seems destined to go away soon.

I will be very disappointed to have to move my main email account to somewhere else.

I suspect Norton is facing similar pressures and responding accordingly.

I use either EaseUS ToDo Backup or  Macrium Reflect for my backup needs.

Windows Defender plus Malwarebytes free or paid, with the Malwarebytes Browser Guard and Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Controls, plus ADWCleaner (all free) seems to be a safe antimalware setup for most Windows 11 Home and Pro users in non-business settings.

-- rc primak

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Perq, windbg, rbailin, Cybertooth

I’ve been using WizTree and TreeSize (both freeware) to get very similar results for a few years now. I think one or both of these programs are based on WinDirStat, but both have been continuously maintained by their developers.

https://diskanalyzer.com/wiztree-vs-windirstat

I also use Linux, and most distros have a feature called “Disk Usage Analyzer”  built-in.

All of these tools allow me to find large and duplicated files. Also, in Linux, I could see where a Windows junction was improperly exposed, resulting in a recursion loop during file transfers. If you’ve never had a recursion loop happen during a file transfer, consider yourself lucky.

-- rc primak

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ibe98765, AlexEiffel, Steve S., Fred, Casey S, Alex5723

One thing Fast Startup does, is it locks the partition so that it can’t be written to. Linux in a dual-boot configuration which shares even an NTFS data partition with Windows when Fast Startup is enabled, can’t write to the partition, change or delete files from it. It’s not just the Windows System partition which gets locked.

I know this is an edge case scenario, but this is why I always disable Fast Startup in Windows. It doesn’t really make that much difference in boot times.

-- rc primak

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AlexEiffel, satrow

What makes social media so addictive are the “engagement algorithms” they use. If more people were aware of the existence of these algorithms, and knew a bit about how they function, we could all be safer online and offline.

Three levels of explanation:

Simple overview. 

More detailed explanation. 

Research-level insights.

 

 

-- rc primak

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Lars220, Chris B, rizzquery, SueW

No one, including the U.S. government, has ordered Kaspersky to shut down. The U.S. government has only ordered Kaspersky to cease doing business within our borders. Context, and accuracy matter.

So how is telling them to stop doing business and to stop providing updates within the US not shutting them down here? Your comment seems self-contradicting.

-- rc primak

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Alex5723, Jay B.

Couldn’t any software with an update mechanism (operating systems, web browsers, etc) be used in a similar way?

Different software vendors have different specifics about how they provide updates. But for security software,  a breach of this sort is very serious business. If any other vendor had experienced such a massive and persistent breach, I would think the whole world would know about it by now, unless it happened very recently.

So no, this sort of breach has not (to my knowledge) been reported with other security vendors.

Reason enough to avoid Kaspersky and their successors.

-- rc primak

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Cesar, Cybertooth

It has to be done legally and constitutionally. Warrants and other judicial reviews , not wholesale dragnets without user consent. A EULA is not sufficient notice.

Better yet, people who don’t want themselves or family members to be falsely accused should not participate in any publicly available DNA database, unless required for employment or other legitimate purposes. Again, with legal safeguards included.

At least in the USA, we are a nation of laws, not unwarranted searches.

-- rc primak

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wavy, SueW