Re: [PLUG] Backing up Windows to Linux

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, May 27, 2023 at 06:14:13AM -0400, Rich Freeman via plug wrote:
> On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 9:03 PM Walt Mankowski via plug
> <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 04:58:14PM -0400, JP Vossen via plug wrote:
> > > `robocopy` will flatly refuse to copy--many things--if Outlook,
> > > Edge, or Teams are in use.
> >
> > Windows will also flat-out refuse to let you attach an Excel
> > spreadsheet to an Outlook email if you have the spreadsheet currently
> > open in Excel, even if it's been saved. So there's definitely some
> > sort of shenanigans going on behind the scenes.
> 
> To be fair, backing up open files in any OS is problematic.  Linux
> will let a process with appropriate privileges do it, but the file
> isn't necessarily in a clean state when it happens.  This is of course
> why applications often have their own backup capabilities, which will
> generate files in a clean state.

Sure, and that's reasonable, but it's not really what I was
saying. Let's say you've got a spreadsheet open in your favorite
spreadsheet program. You save it as budget.xlsx. If you were in
LibreOffice Calc, you can then drag budget.xlsx from your file manager
into a browser window where you're composing an email in Outlook, and
it will add it as an attachment.

If you try to do the same thing in Windows, you can't do it until you
close the window with budget.xlsx. This is often a pain. Maybe you
just opened budget.xlsx to make sure it's the right file. You've still
got to close the window before you can drag it as an attachment.

Interestingly, macOS used to have little icons on document windows
that you could use to drag them to other apps. In other words, it
*encouraged* you to do what Windows doesn't let you do at all! Sadly
they got rid of them a few releases ago, then sort of brought them
back, but they don't work as well as they used to.

But this is getting to be a big digression from Windows backups...

Walt
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