Almost from Windows 8, Almost Live,....
Mar. 30th, 2021 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIt's the Gong Show!
Or, rather, the Outlook Backup Show!
The old work computer, now the only one I've got given that the backup machine is literally in pieces in a Wegmans bag, has been running painfully slow at times. One suspected cause is that I'm a bad boy about archiving old work emails. My Outlook inbox dates back to 2012; sent items got archived at some point, but even that bad boy still has shit from 2017 in it.
So before starting any actual work today, I asked the program to archive anything in any personal folders older than 3/31/18. I figure three years of Everything would be sufficient, and I can always open the archive file if I need to go further back in time.
And Outlook said, fine.... and proceeded to spend the next twelve hours doing so.
Twelve hours, give or take.... I left it before Eleanor went to work because I forgot some stuff at home, then again at lunchtime, and finally decided to just leave it running when I left the office around 5. I forgot we needed to take some cash money out for something we're doing here tomorrow, so I just hit the ATM and checked, and the archive- just of the inbox, mind- had finally processed. Now I'm backing up the original complete file to an external drive before deleting all the pre-April 2018 stuff from the active outlook dot pst file.
It made for an interesting day, since I couldn't interrupt it with things like receiving or sending emails- or so I thought. In a fit of forgetfulness at one point, I just clicked on the "new message" button while the archiving was going, and lo and behold it let me send one. I found I could also navigate to older emails and answer those, and even fiddle with my calendar, without stopping the process.
Once archived and backed up, I checked and the damn .pst file was the same damn size it was to begin with. But wait, there's more! You have to fiddle with data management settings to compact it! Which it's now doing, for who knows how long?
But I've already achieved one of Life's Little Victories this week in the backing-up department.
----
In the next room, there's a Frankenputer of an old HP laptablet running Windows 8.1, connected to an external monitor and keyboard because the hinges on the machine itself went to Jesus many years back. We use it for making ::koff:: archival copies of large-size files.
I had one of these I wanted to um, archive, yeah, that's the ticket!, so I could return the original media to, how you say?, yeah, a secure offsite location! I popped the media in the external drive and turned the old beast on.
Whereupon, the Windows 8.1 Update function, which I had been fastidiously ignoring prompts about for weeks, got all uppity with me: I AM RESTARTING IN 15 MINUTES BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T GIVE ME A TIME TO DO IT AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP ME. NYAH NYAH.
Fuck you, Bill. I put my disk in, hit the start button and watched as the program began to do its thing:
TIME REMAINING: 16:04
AND THEY'RE OFF!
As often happens with such estimates, the 15:40 turned into 13:something within a minute. Now we had a race!
By the time the Red Screen of Death arose to say the restart would begin in 15 seconds, 14, 13,....my project had moved to the final analysis stage that was 30 percent complete,.... 40,.... 80,....
Made it by two seconds!
----
File's still compacting.
We'll wait until tomorrow to find out whether performance will be improved by the reduction of the .pst file from almost 14 gig to its nice new svelte size.
So, until then, one last note about large things getting stuck:
Great news at the Suez Canal Monday morning! Canal Authority officials brought in Roy Hinkley, an internationally recognized expert in nautical disasters, to assist in getting the USS Evergreen out of the middle of the waterway. He gave them an initial estimate of three hours.
Or, rather, the Outlook Backup Show!
The old work computer, now the only one I've got given that the backup machine is literally in pieces in a Wegmans bag, has been running painfully slow at times. One suspected cause is that I'm a bad boy about archiving old work emails. My Outlook inbox dates back to 2012; sent items got archived at some point, but even that bad boy still has shit from 2017 in it.
So before starting any actual work today, I asked the program to archive anything in any personal folders older than 3/31/18. I figure three years of Everything would be sufficient, and I can always open the archive file if I need to go further back in time.
And Outlook said, fine.... and proceeded to spend the next twelve hours doing so.
Twelve hours, give or take.... I left it before Eleanor went to work because I forgot some stuff at home, then again at lunchtime, and finally decided to just leave it running when I left the office around 5. I forgot we needed to take some cash money out for something we're doing here tomorrow, so I just hit the ATM and checked, and the archive- just of the inbox, mind- had finally processed. Now I'm backing up the original complete file to an external drive before deleting all the pre-April 2018 stuff from the active outlook dot pst file.
It made for an interesting day, since I couldn't interrupt it with things like receiving or sending emails- or so I thought. In a fit of forgetfulness at one point, I just clicked on the "new message" button while the archiving was going, and lo and behold it let me send one. I found I could also navigate to older emails and answer those, and even fiddle with my calendar, without stopping the process.
Once archived and backed up, I checked and the damn .pst file was the same damn size it was to begin with. But wait, there's more! You have to fiddle with data management settings to compact it! Which it's now doing, for who knows how long?
But I've already achieved one of Life's Little Victories this week in the backing-up department.
----
In the next room, there's a Frankenputer of an old HP laptablet running Windows 8.1, connected to an external monitor and keyboard because the hinges on the machine itself went to Jesus many years back. We use it for making ::koff:: archival copies of large-size files.
I had one of these I wanted to um, archive, yeah, that's the ticket!, so I could return the original media to, how you say?, yeah, a secure offsite location! I popped the media in the external drive and turned the old beast on.
Whereupon, the Windows 8.1 Update function, which I had been fastidiously ignoring prompts about for weeks, got all uppity with me: I AM RESTARTING IN 15 MINUTES BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T GIVE ME A TIME TO DO IT AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP ME. NYAH NYAH.
Fuck you, Bill. I put my disk in, hit the start button and watched as the program began to do its thing:
TIME REMAINING: 16:04
AND THEY'RE OFF!
As often happens with such estimates, the 15:40 turned into 13:something within a minute. Now we had a race!
By the time the Red Screen of Death arose to say the restart would begin in 15 seconds, 14, 13,....my project had moved to the final analysis stage that was 30 percent complete,.... 40,.... 80,....
Made it by two seconds!
----
File's still compacting.
We'll wait until tomorrow to find out whether performance will be improved by the reduction of the .pst file from almost 14 gig to its nice new svelte size.
So, until then, one last note about large things getting stuck:
Great news at the Suez Canal Monday morning! Canal Authority officials brought in Roy Hinkley, an internationally recognized expert in nautical disasters, to assist in getting the USS Evergreen out of the middle of the waterway. He gave them an initial estimate of three hours.