Strav's blog

Our patio and walkways - particularly by the pool, are riddled with wide expansion joints which generally are filled with cracked and broken pieces.  I believe that the solution is a "concrete expansion joint" such as the SlabGasket.  It's pretty expensive and not the highest priority at the moment so I'm documenting it just for future reference.

Generally speaking, Windows Defender has evolved to a point where I can now (along with common sense) use it as the only antivirus on a Windows system.  There are times, however, when it needs to be disabled permanently (for a non-networked machine.  Here is a page detailing how to do so.

How to permanently disable Windows Defender Antivirus on Windows 10

Similar (though not nearly as complete) as rsync for linux, I often use robocopy to synchronize Windows filesystems.  The microsoft documents on robocopy are very complete, however since there are a LOT of options, it is always nice to have a common example of how I use it.  Here is one that I use to replicate (or mirror) an entire drive to a folder on another drive:

robocopy C:\ <target drive and folder> /MIR /XJ /R:0 /W:1 /NP /NDL /LOG+:"%cd%\backup_%label%.log" 2>>errors.txt 

From time to time, I need to securely erase data from a hard drive.  In the past, I've generally used Darik's Boot and Nuke or DBAN however, DBAN does not work on SSD's.  Parted Magic, however, does have a utility to securely erase SSD's which is documented in the link below.

How to securely erase an SSD drive

Since I'm constantly using rsync and needing to refer to examples, here is a link to rsync examples.

10 Practical Examples of rsync Command in Linux
How to Exclude Files and Directories with Rsync

Also, here is an example of how to duplicate a (live) linux root filesystem

rsync -avP --numeric-ids --exclude='/dev' --exclude='/proc' --exclude='/sys' root@failedharddrivehost:/ /path/to/destination/