Hahahaha, sorry to hear (but I empathize). I can be a cheap bastard, so I have some shitty thumb drives around. I figure they eventually die anyway, so this stuff isn’t permanent.
I keep a folder on my server with the tools and noted to rebuild each one. Sometimes I even make an image with the tools, and only leave the ISOs out.
Ventoy kicks ass for a multi-boot drive. Just drop the ISO on the drive and Ventoy sees it. Slick
I’ve found some thumb drives don’t like to boot.
Ventoy has worked for almost everything. Proxmox doesn’t like it.
NT (and therefore all Windows versions today) always had multi-user security. It’s essentially a ported version of DEC Alpha.
On install, the first user is admin, just like the first Linux account is root, or else you wouldn’t be able configure the machine.
Windows architecture built on DOS (3.x, 95,etc) lacked any such security, and was developed as a single-user OS (goes back to DOS86).
Logitech wireless mice don’t work on Linux until you find out someone wrote an app you can install to make them work.
My brand new Logitech mouse works on Windows 95 on first plugin.
Don’t tell me mice work fine on Linux. It doesn’t even natively support the most common mouse there is.
Except OP’s friend doesn’t want to run Linux
Lol, nice. And accurate.
People keep pushing Linux everything.
I run Linux as Proxmox, VM’s, containers, etc. Great stuff.
I have Mint on a laptop… What an awful experience. It’s tremendously better than it was in 2000, but holy cow the issues and incompatibilities.
Right up front two major issues with Linux:
No standard UI - it’s different on every system
No standard tools - you can’t rely on the same tools being on every machine
Sounds like he doesn’t want to spend his time tinkering, but playing.
Can’t blame him.
If he wants Windows, why are you questioning what he wants to do with his computer? He’s had enough of playing fuck-fuck with Linux. (Mind, I work with Linux all day, every day, it’s the cat’s meow for dedicated services like Proxmox, TrueNAS, containers, etc).
Go get Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more.
And you can permanently license it using Microsoft’s own scripts.
Lol.
ThinkPads have drainage channels and protective layers inside
The VPN is to give you access to your files from anywhere, since you don’t have the storage capacity on your laptop for all of them.
If you have an encrypted connection to home, laptop storage isn’t a concern.
As a benefit, this also solves the risk of losing files that are only on the laptop, by keeping the at home.
Yea, Syncthing has it’s moments (and uses - I keep hundreds of gigs between 5 phones and 5 laptops/desktops in sync with it).
Resilio does use the bittorrent protocol, but uses keys and authorization for shares. Give it a try, it may address your need to access files remotely. I use it to access my media (about 2TB) which clearly can’t be sync’d to my laptop (or phone). I can grab any file, at any time.
What’s your network performance look like? 100mbit? Gigabit?
External drives are terribly slow, USB doesn’t have great throughout. Also they’re unreliable, do you have backups? I’d look into making those drives internal (SATA) which has much better throughput. I use one external drive on USB3 for duplication, and it’s noticeably slower on file transfers, like 40%.
For remote access to your files, look into Tailscale. You run it on your laptop and server (or any compatible device in your network), and it provides a virtual mesh network that functions like a LAN between devices.
Syncthing is great, but it just keeps files in, entire folders of them. So if space is tight on the laptop, it won’t really help, not easily anyway.
Resilio Sync has Selective Sync, where it can index a folder and store that index on any device participating in that sync job. Then you can select which files to sync at any time.
If full backups aren’t possible that’s an administrator failure.
Reliance on a file system to never fail rather than have proper backups, is an administrator failure.
ANY system can, and will, fail. Thinking and behaving otherwise is an administrator failure.
“Everything gets gone, sooner or later” - being prepared for it is good administrator behaviour.
Find a new company? 😆