Hacker News: jacobwilliamroy

Ask HN: What is the best way to see what files are being read in Windows?

jacobwilliamroy — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:02:06 +0000

I am looking at migrating a Windows server (Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard) and I am wondering if there is some way to learn what files are being read. I know the operating system keeps this metadata but I have also learned that this metadata is unreliable. Is there a third party tool or some kind of powershell script I can use to track this data?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994050

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:36:00 +0000

I need to know what people are doing recently because most of the documentation I'm finding online is from 3-5 years ago and I want the most up-to-date information.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:26:53 +0000

It's just bigger than any amount I've ever dealt with in my whole life (I'm 30) and also it's hard to find solutions to manage it without running into bandwidth caps and also things are running for a very long time on the client side: days or weeks.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:52:07 +0000

This is for a "warm" backup as opposed to a hot backup so restoration timeline would be like seven days.

Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:12:30 +0000

I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981308

Points: 22

# Comments: 20

Ask HN: What would you recommend as a replacement for Windows Storage Replica?

jacobwilliamroy — Thu, 29 May 2025 20:36:54 +0000

So to make a very long story short, at my job we are using Storage Replica to replicate two servers that are sitting right next to each other: one server is a mirror of the other and vice versa. We are using Storage Replica to do this since these are Windows servers but I have a few really big problems with Storage Replica:

1) The documentation is very poor

2) There is no way to configure automated failover in our current server-to-server configuration (I've been at this for over forty hours. Don't ask. It's not possible)

3) We would want to have a third, client computer that is able to manage the Windows Storage Replica servers but Storage Replica is a Windows Server feature and so can only be installed on Windows servers which the client is not

Is there another availability solution which does not share these flaws with Storage Replica? I am currently researching such but I am having a hard time searching the web for a Storage Replica replacement so I am also asking here if anybody knows of one.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130137

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Ask HN: Should I implement my own integrity checks on my fileserver?"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:33:37 +0000

I am only trying to ensure the data on the local system is the same as the data on the server. There is no adversary in the middle modifying data; so this is strictly about detecting corruption.

Ask HN: Should I implement my own integrity checks on my fileserver?

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:00:51 +0000

So I have an SFTP server [Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-55-generic x86_64)] and an SFTP client (Windows 11): the client downloads files from the SFTP server. I had an idea to implement integrity checks by hashing the file on server side and also hashing the client's copy of the file after it is downloaded, then comparing the hashes to ensure the data was downloaded correctly. My question is: should I spend time implementing this? Does the OS already do this? This seems like something an OS should do.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986099

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach"

jacobwilliamroy — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:56:59 +0000

I DO

I HAVE 3

3 IS MORE THAN 1

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach"

jacobwilliamroy — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:56:11 +0000

Do you make it like a fun game? Like when me and my friends in school would pass eachother coded notes and the cipher was an inside joke?

I'm genuinely curious: what was the pitch that you used to get others to start using signal?

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach"

jacobwilliamroy — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:56:02 +0000

Do you make it like a fun game? Like when me and my friends in school would pass eachother coded notes and the cipher was an inside joke?

I'm genuinely curious: what was the pitch that you used to get others to start using signal?

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach"

jacobwilliamroy — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:50:02 +0000

Do you exclusively use signal? Do your friends also use signal? Do you have friends who only use signal to communucate with you?

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "A Dramatic Reading: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again"

jacobwilliamroy — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 19:36:40 +0000

When people would rather use crypto than their national currency, that is an indictment of the currency, not an endorsement of crypto.

Ask HN: How do I learn about Windows licensing?

jacobwilliamroy — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:34:27 +0000

Windows licensing is really complicated: I never know how much it's going to cost, how long it's going to take, for example, to install Windows 11 Pro on 80 different computers. Or it's not clear what the upgrade path would be from Windows 7 home to Windows 11 Pro. Is there something I can read or a course I can take so I can learn more about Windows licensing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40812344

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:23:00 +0000

Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says"

jacobwilliamroy — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:21:06 +0000

Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says"

jacobwilliamroy — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 16:44:41 +0000

I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive.

I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says"

jacobwilliamroy — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:18:56 +0000

In Windows you can use the task manager to configure what programs are started with your computer.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11"

jacobwilliamroy — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:14:43 +0000

I just don't have a personal computer. I just use other people's computers. Accept all cookies. Honestly if advertisers can figure out how to track me across multiple browsers on multiple OSes on multiple computers on multiple networks, then that's actually really impressive and I would like to know how they did it.

New comment by jacobwilliamroy in "Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11"

jacobwilliamroy — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:11:22 +0000

>this should be core OS GUI functionality

Be careful. This is how distros start.