Well, that was an ugly little surprise

Norma has been possessed by the spirit of my mother.
But not my mother's sense of good taste.  Pity. Mother
would never dress up like Fred Flintstone in drag. 

Dear Reader: If you are a Mac user of a certain type who loves to pile on the misery by reminding PC users that Mac's and you are superior, and get through my daily twaddle and think that leaving a smarmy note like "You wouldn't have had this problem is you were using a Mac," you don't want to go there.  My MacBook really is my other computer and I can regale you with hardware and software issues on that machine, including a crapped out hard drive after three years of use and the night before my brothers funeral. So keep your piehole closed on this one.

Well, now that we got THAT out of the way, we,  I mean I, Cookie, got a nasty surprise when we turned on the workhorse computer today!

No, not ransomware, thank the gods and thank the actual one true G*d whose name is so perfect that one dare not write it out.

EVIDENTLY, a year and a half ago, when Cookie updated the le Machine to Win10, a toggle got flipped to include "FILE HISTORY" onto my "Z" drive, which is where I back up stuff to anyway, I thought "How great is this?"   I set must have set it and thought, gee, this is nifty - automatically backing up my files and only my files.  Meaning my documents, my pictures, my music, etc. and so on.

And the great thing about file history is that it catches pretty much everything.  Create a graphic and save it, and then you edit it and save it again, only to open it later and decide that the last edit really did muff it up?  File History to the rescue, because it has a copy of the image is held at multiple time points.  Nifty, see?

So I have been working on this horrifically HUGE project for the archive in California and I had to do some image file conversions.  Since my main drive - at 2TB is over half full,  And Cookie hates a half full main drive, anyway, I decided to move the non-converted original project files over the Z file. 

But when I brought up "My Computer" and saw I got a bit sick to my stomach.  The "Z drive" was a few mega bites away from being totally full. 

Quelle horreur!

How in the hell did that happen?

I called my friend Missy, and Missy said "You know, that happened to me right before Christmas.  It was like being handed that looked like Chief Wiggam....So I pulled the secondary, took it to MicroCenter, bought a bigger drive and had them migrate it for me.  Poke around and let me know what you find out."

So I poked around, and did some digging around and discovered something.

When I installed Windows10, it must have asked me about this setting to make a "File History" auto backup - which creates a file called "File History" (duh) and I never set it to a time limit on how long to keep the files before the program would overwrite them. 

So for the past 18 months, it's been creating file after file after copy after copy and suddenly we have 800MG of files, which are getting updated every hour.

That is critical mass on a grand fuck-up scale.

So today I reset the options to a reasonable 90-day limit because, by that point, I forget that there ever was another version like the current one.

So that raised another point.  What to do with the 800mg of stuff it created? 

See Cookie is not the type of data swashbuckler who cavalierly just deletes stuff like that just because you can.  I want to make sure that everything continues to run for a few days and boots up without a problem.  Once I am certain that everything is running fine, THEN I'll delete the stuff.

So what that meant was moving this data elephant to another drive - the server, which was started at 8am today and is still chugging away at 3:25pm and looks to wrap up in about an hour.

SO, use my pain and suffering to make sure you go and check your settings on this program. Make sure you didn't do something stupid like Cookie did. 

Better I should suffer, than you.