Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein for December 30, 2015

@TonyMe, I just trying to figure out what’s going on with Firefox.That should keep me occupied for the next year or so.

For New Year little man is sleeping over at his cousin’s. In general? Having trouble sleeping as usual. Hoping next year will be better than this one was. Hoping the price of steel goes up. Our market got flooded with foreign product and we are weeks away from charging people to get rid of their junk cars.

I never know what I’m doing…sigh….

Once again…. you can just ask Bev.

Oh…. there is one area in which I think what I’m doing is working well….and it has something to do with yesterday’s forum, which I missed, and Tony’s sad tale about his laptop….

But first… @Tony, I’m sorry that happened…I hope you can recover your computer and keys and all….and I’m glad you had backed up your data.

As for what I do… in case this is useful to anyone else here…I use Google Drive…

You just download it, and it installs its own folder on your computer.And then, everything you put into it is magically duplicated in a matching Google Drive folder on the Web, which you can also access.

So I save everything.in sub-folders in my Google Drive folder, instead of one of the “libraries” in Windows.

You can save into the usual Windows folders, and copy everything manually into Drive…But I’ve decided I don’t need to, cos the files in that folder really exist on your hard drive… accessible without an internet connection.

So now, everything is automatically backed up, without having to remember to do it, as long as I make sure my programs are saving to that folder.which continuously syncs with the web one.You get some web storage free, but I pay a couple of dollars a month for more…an automatic withdrawal so I don’t have to think about that either.

The bonus is, by putting the app on my phone, as well, I can view the web folder, with all my stuff on it.and upload the pictures I take on my phone, so they’ll be on my computer.The big payoff was two years ago, when my computer crashed..I bought this little laptop….installed Google drive..and after a few hours downloading, everything I’d saved was on my new computer.

There are other cloud back-up and storage services…I haven’t used them….so I can’t compare..All I know is, I feel more secure than I used to.

Happy to know I’m not the only one that spends his Amateur Night this way.

Doing? House party next door! No driving, just partying!

@Tony. I never go out on Amateur Night, i just quit drinking, so I think I’ll find a good old movie to watch on TCM. :)

I treat it like any other day. Given that the 1st will be a day off, I’ll be in bed by 9:30 and up by 5:30 like any other day off.

Stan should be happy he can still fit in his tuxedo from 1985. We are at our daughter’s house for New Year’s Eve. She is having a few friends over and we will have a game night.

One of the nice things about a tux is they rarely go out of style! Unfortunately, for me anyway, I put it away in a zippered bag and when I take it out again, for reasons unknown, it shrank…

It’s the zippered bag. Starved for oxygen, it began to consume itself. The backstory on this strip works out to be a doosey, in my head.

Well….hopefully little man will be spending his New Year’s Eve with his cousin. Just found out that we only have one long way out to the hwy left. I was watching the news and they recently rescued a man and his dog from the roof of their house in Eureka. They lost the sewage treatment plant in Fenton and the one in Valley Park is in jeopardy. They haven’t closed down this much of hwy 44 since 1982. High Ridge, which isn’t far from our business, just lost their water treatment plant to the flood and will be under a boil order before long. I’m hoping the creek behind work doesn’t take the back fence. If that goes about 60 old cars that are piled up may go with it.

I keep to my usual schedule and will be studying the inside of my eyelids at midnight. New Year’s Day is take down the Christmas decorations so I need my rest to shove all those full boxes back up into the attic.

We are very much homebodies, but each year, for the past 30, we have gone out with the same two couples. The three wives went to high school together. But true to our cultural heritage, we consume sparkling non-alcoholic beverages.

Bev… are you safe from flooding?

It looked like it, on the maps I saw…but I worry about both you and jkiss, when you have to go out on the roads.Stay safe and dry, both of you!

Nosirrom and neverenoughgold…

I have never used Paragon…but programs like that usually will back up to either a “protected” location, often a “virtual drive”, ie a partition, on your hard drive, or to an external hard drive.

I don’t have a budget for replacing computers just cos I want something newer…I have to keep them as long as I can… usually until they won’t boot any more.

My last three have gone out with destroyed or damaged hard drives or motherboards, so a backup on a virtual drive would be just as lost as anything else.

I own two external drives… and a pile of 1990’s backups on floppy disks. Yes, they’re all “old” now, but the point was to save everything at that time, with the methods available.

I no longer have a floppy drive, but I’d backed most of the floppy content to a newer computer and then one of the externals…but both of those quit working years ago… and they all have outdated file structures, even though the last one was bought in about 2008.

I have some later flash backups, but the thumb drives available at the time were quite small… and I didn’t know that some have (terrible) software that syncs instead of just backing up..One of them removed a bunch of files I was trying to save from a dying computer, by backloading its own content over them.

My cloud files keep up with the times. I’ve been backing up that way since 2010 with no problems.

Yeah, theoretically they could go down or be hacked…but the Google Drive folder on my computer is real, not virtual… so it’s a backup for the cloud one, if there were ever a temporary outage.

But I trust Google, for what that’s worth, not to lose all their servers and their mirrors…It’s gotta be at least as reliable as my previous physical backups.And as for hacking…I don’t keep anything on my laptop or my phone that I’d be scared to have stolen anyway.

No compromising pictures (sorry…. but believe me, it’s for the best…. LOL) no incriminating evidence,,,, AFAIK…

I never use a password-keeping file or program…just a text document with some hints that no one but me would understand.

I feel way safer in the cloud than I’ve felt with other “safety nets.”

Well, call me a fool, but I will stick with my flash drives for backups.

As for New Year’s Eve, the lack of sleep I have had the past 2 nights, I will probably be asleep before the ball drops! LOL!