Book finished

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

I think this just about catches me up with the Ender-related novels. This one was pretty decent (not all were, IMO).

I found this near the end:

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

Backing up my photos - part N+1

Well, guess what? I'm back to rsync.

MS SyncToy 2.0 just irritated me with taking literally hours to start up in some situations. SyncToy 1.4 is fast but the control they use to determine which directories to include doesn't flow down to subdirectories - if you have a directory which contained hundreds of subdirectories, you can't just uncheck the parent, you have to drill down and uncheck each of them. Furthermore, if subdirectories get added for future runs, it will include them unless you remember to drill all over and find them and uncheck them.

Also, BOTH SyncToys had problems with doing the same mirror to two physically different drives with the same drive letter. I plug in one drive at a time and mirror to them. After syncing to one T:, then putting in a different T:, it assumed they were the same and refused to do anything, since it figured they were already sync'ed, even if the new T: was totally blank. If I added a new file on the source, it would copy it to the destination and that would be the only file there. I had to add a separate but identical job and would have had to keep them straight for which drive they were for.

I tried Toucan, which looked promising, but as far as I can tell, it isn't smart enough to ignore the read-only flag on destination files, even though there's a checkbox for "ignore read-only".

There are a bunch of other choices, but none both free and good, and honestly, $30 for a sync program? Really rsync does absolutely everything and does it perfectly, I just wanted a nice interface. But I'll take "works, and I know exactly what it's doing, and I can make it do anything I want" any time.

It's still a little kludgy under Windows, but I've decided it's a small price to pay for having software that I *trust* and I know it's doing the right thing.

Bottom line: rsync *works*, correctly, reliably, predictably.