I’ve never had to restore a backup (yet), but to me this is the best feature of Restic.
I used Duplicati for a while (I think it was Duplicati, not Duplicacy) and although the backups seemed to work, I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.
Restic is a slight chore to get set up with the environmental variables, figuring out which directories to “–ignore”, etc… but man once it’s set up it’s just great.
I’m not sure I fully grasp what you want, but Restic is excellent. I use a cronjob to back up on a schedule. It’s command line only. I think there’s a tool to make it a GUI but I haven’t tried it. They have a Docker image available but it’s weird, you have to pass commands to it, it runs, then shuts down when it’s done. I love Docker but that didn’t quite work for me.
I use Backblaze B2 for storage, but any S3 will do. Restic supports all sorts of storage targets.
Credentials and things go in an .env file, or you can put everything into the command line every time.
When it’s time to restore things, you can fricken mount the whole backup you want and browse the files, copy and paste what you need, etc. That part is really cool to me.
Backblaze is $5 or $6 USD per TB per month, so 500GB will be about $36USD a year.
I looked at three of the banks/brokerages I use and the results are interesting!
The brokerages present you with step by step screens, and first have you choose the “to” account. Then you click ‘Next’ and choose the “from” account.
My bank presents them on the same screen, going top down. On top you pick the “from”, and below it you select “to”.
So, despite my strong opinion, apparently there hasn’t been any consistency in my experience, granted I don’t transfer money very often.
It’s not a perfect example. The need to pay sort of starts as soon as you put something in your shopping basket. I’m not transferring money to the cashier unless it’s cash – otherwise it goes somewhere else and eventually the store gets it.
It’s just a thought experiment about something reasonably similar, and the similarities for me start after everything is rung up and it’s time to move money.
We have very different brains in regards to this subject.
When I pay for something (moving money) the first thing to do is choose the source. Cash, credit card, venmo, etc. Only once I’ve decided that can I pick where to move it… The cashiers hand, credit card machine, scan a venmo barcode, etc.
It has to do with taking up screen space. “Advertising and headers take up …”. The title bar is sort of a header, so I posted how to remove it.
Right click up on the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar”. Uncheck “Title Bar” to get ride of the text at the top of the screen.
Edit: apparently this stuck a nerve. This is a way to increase screen space, just like how someone recommended using verticle tabs.
If it’s just for charging, a USB-C port is just a different part. The charge controller and everything can stay “dumb” if it’s a low power device.
The USB-C spec is complicated and to take full advantage of it is expensive like you said, but I think just using a modern form factor isn’t expensive.
Yeah, that stinks.
I don’t have an answer, but if you research how to boot Linux off a USB stick, maybe you can get that tool to run without having to wipe Windows.