Courtesy of NeoWin, I’ve just learned that March 31 is World Backup Day. There’s even a website at — you guessed it — worldbackupday.com. Sponsors include Amazon, Mega (file download service provider), iStorage and Backblaze (online backup/storage providers) and mijn.host, along with the World Backup Day organization. There’s even a pledge: “I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and previous memories on March 31st. #WorldBackupDay.” Indeed, let me wish all readers a happy World Backup Day 2023.

Note: the intro graphic comes from the WorldBackupDay.com home page, and is intended to motivate people to back up their stuff. I can only endorse this proposition. I myself learned the importance and value of backups in 1990 when a 300MB SCSI drive on a Mac died on me, and lost me a book I was writing at the time (and more). It was a disaster! But I learned my lesson, and I’ve lost nothing important since to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

What Happens on World Backup Day 2023?

Ideally, everybody makes sure they make a backup of everything they want to keep, or protect against damage, loss or breach. Personally, I back up my production PC daily (including the system drive, plus two smaller drives where I keep all ongoing project work).

But there’s more:

1. You must know how to restore the backups you make.
2. You should make yourself familiar with rescue or repair media so you can boot and restore a backup even on a PC (or other device) that’s not booting normally. Some backup packages require separate bootable media for each protected PC (I have a tray full of teeny-tiny Mushkin Atom flash drives for just that purpose).
3. You should practice a restore occasionally. I end up using restore capabilities at least once a month myself — mostly because of self-inflicted issues arising from experiments — so I’m always ready to rock’n’roll.
4. Ideally, you should keep one or more backups offsite or online. That way if a meteorite takes out your home or office, you can still get back online by restoring to a different PC. I keep two backups in the cloud: one on OneDrive, the other in Norton Backup.

My basic guiding principle is that anything worth storing once is worth backing up at least twice (as just described). Thus, let me repeat the salutation “Happy World Backup Day 2023” and gently urge you to backup, backup, backup. Cheers!

(Free) Backup Software Worth Using

My go-to backup solution has long been Macrium Reflect Free (I also use the paid version). But its maker, Paramount Software, has announced its discontinuing that version at the end of 2023. I’m casting about for a replacement, given that something free is important for me and my fleet of 10 PCs (6 of which are loaners from Lenovo for testing purposes). I’m digging into stories like this one (and more like it) at PC World “The best free backup software and services…” and Lifewire‘s more comprehensive coverage to find a Goldilocks solution that’s “just right.” Stay tuned…

If you’ve been reading my posts lately, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve complained — just a little — recently about the Software Update Monitor (SUMo) update utility. Over the weekend, the developer himself tweeted me to let me know he’d seen my input and fixed the issue. In fact, he agreed with me that SUMo shouldn’t be recommending a preview/beta version of ANY software. Hence my assertion that the SUMO developer pays attention. He does!

If SUMo Developer Pays Attention, Then What?

He obviously read my recent (Feb 27) post entitled “Update Semantics: Current versus Preview.” And indeed, SUMo is no longer recommending an update to pre-release versions of OneDrive. As you can see in the screencap at the head of this blog post, the current version is indeed recognized as the current version now. It’s highlighted in blue, and comes up with the same version I agree is the current one. Good-oh!

But What About CPU-Z?

I thought I’d caught him out again for asserting this week that CPU-Z needed an update. The download page reports it as version 2.0.5, but SUMo wants version 2.0.5.1. And, sure enough, upon downloading and updating the latest version from the home page, it self-reports as version 2.0.5 (no fourth digit). But after updating and looking at the readme file, here’s what it says:

Sure enough, it really IS version 2.0.5.1. Says so right there!

I’ll be darned. Sometimes the toolmakers know more than the owners/developers do — or what they report, anyway. Very interesting! My thanks to @KCSoftwares: it is nice to know somebody’s paying attention.

Flipping through the Windows news this morning, I was tickled. I saw the very same Lenovo P16 Mobile Workstation sitting next to my desk come up first in MS PowerUser‘s rankings of the best i9 laptops for 2023. That’s right: in this story, the P16 Mobile Workstation gets accolades. And it IS a beast: i9-12950HX, 2 TB NVMe, 128 GB RAM and NVIDIA RTX A5550 GPU.

Here’s Why P16 Mobile Workstation Gets Accolades

It’s got a lot of power. The P16 can tackle tremendous workloads. The cooling is enough to keep it going even when taxed (excellent heatpipes & fans). It’s modestly expandable (my grouse: keyboard must come out to access second M.2 slot for NVMe). It’s especially laden with ports and connections (2 USB-A, 2 USB-C, HDMI, as shown in the lead-in graphic).

There hasn’t been anything I’ve thrown at this machine that it hasn’t chomped its way through faster than any of the other PCs around here. It really, truly is a beast of a machine.

What Might Stop Such a Stellar Purchase?

The list price on this monster is US$9,763.00 as configured. But with current coupons and discounts, it could be yours for a mere US$5,369.65, according to the Lenovo Store. I would have to get special permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (my wife, Dina) and be feeling quite flush in the bank account to go forward with such a purchase. But man: what a machine!

It’s got superlative USB4 and Thunderbolt 4support. The P16 delivers superfast IO, internally and through those ports. It’s got a great display, and works like a champ. Given its price tag, you’d have to expect all those things. Totally awesome, though: I completely agree with the MS PowerUser assessment, and understand how and why it showed up first therein.

Who needs a machine like this? It’s not a gaming box. It’s aimed squarely at people who need a portable workstation for developing code, creating media, or handling major, intensive workloads (lots of VMs, AI/ML tasks, 3D modeling, and so forth). Those folks will typically look at the price, understand what the PC can do for their productivity and throughput, and think “Good value for the money.” ‘Nuff said…

A little over two weeks ago, I found myself dealing with a suddenly non-functional Caldigit TS4 dock. This morning, I finally figured out what I’d been doing wrong. There’s one and only one high-wattage USB-C connector on the TS4. And there’s one and only one USB-C connector on most of my Lenovo laptops that will accept power and signals. The short explanation is: I hooked the wrong “gozouta” into the wrong “gozinta.” Net result: signals, but not enough power to make things work. Doh! Thus, this gets my recent CalDigit Hiatus finally illuminated.

Caldigit Hiatus Finally Illuminated, Literally

If you look at the lead-in graphic, you’ll see that the leftmost USB-C port on the back of the CalDigit is labeled “Computer.” It’s the port that delivers up to 98W of power to a PC, along with TB4/USB4 capability. I had somehow gotten my ports wrong, and used the middle one instead. Not paying sufficient attention? Guilty as charged. The red-boxed USB-C is the proper gozouta for the Caldigit hub.

Likewise on my Lenovo Yoga 7 14ITL5 (specs are PDF formatted), the left-hand USB-C port is also the only one that accepts TB4/USB4 and power together. Thus it’s the proper gozinta for the laptop in question.

Sigh. Put the right ports together and everything works just fine. Put the wrong ones together, and the PC doesn’t get enough power to run properly, nor for the TS4 dock connections to work as expected. Sigh again: it’s not hard to get the obvious wrong, but it can be challenging to recognize the obvious if one’s wits aren’t entirely engaged.

For This, I  Contacted Tech Support?

Yes, I admit it: I did that. And we all assumed I was using the right ports. Thus, they were as baffled as I was by what the lack of a power light really meant. Now I know: the light comes on when you use the high-wattage USB-C port to run power into a PC or laptop. And when you set the connections up as they should be, everything works likewise. Go ahead: laugh! Once I got over my astonishment at missing the obvious, that’s what I did too.

Last week, I ran an experiment Monday through Friday. Each day, I made sure to use winget upgrade and Software Update Monitor (aka SUMo) to check updates on 9 PCs here at Chez Tittel. I kept track of how many updates each tool found in tabular form. In each daily data cell, the first value counts updates winget found, and the second value counts updates SUMo found. It was interesting and unexpectedly time-consuming (averaged 75 minutes each day). It does give me a better sense of Windows application update rhythms, though.

Checking Windows Application Update Rhythms

The  9 machines in my sample included 1 4th-Gen CPU and 1 6th-gen Intel CPU (both perforce running Windows 10). All but one of the other machines run Windows 11, and all but one are 8th Gen Intel CPUs or higher (the hold-out runs a Ryzen 7 5800X). Each machine runs anywhere from 24 applications listed in SUMo to as many as 62. In the results table, an “at sign” (@) means that either Winget or SUMo recommended an update that I couldn’t install (winget) or find (SUMo). That latter one proved time consuming indeed.

Table of Results

A total of 131 updates were put forward by one or the other tool last week, for an average of about 14.5 for the week for each PC. The range of values went from a low of 8 to a high of 24.

What this tells me is that tracking updates could be a constant effort, were one minded to invest the time and energy. It also shows that the pace of updates is pretty brisk, and somewhat relentless. This makes it very clear why, except for emergency security patches, most organizations of any size prefer to limit updates to scheduled windows of fixed duration.

Otherwise, it’s the kind of rabbit hole into which admins could disappear, never to be seen again!