but they shared symbols for the tishell64 DLL to help us understand what was going on.
This is perhaps the most surprising sentence in this article. A proprietary software company sharing debugging symbols (which are basically the closest thing to source code that isn't source code) when you just ask their support about an issue is something that I'd never expect to happen.
I was surprised also when this happened, but pleased. The trust was nice. The fact that they needed to give me the symbols in order to understand the issue was surprising. Why couldn't they find the calls in their source? Or analyze the trace themselves? Curious.
Symbols for Windows system DLLs has been available for ages, downloadable in one click directly from within Visual Studio. So it's not without a precendent.
Windows ends up being a thousand cuts situation when you have enough software like this installed. If you want a responsive and stable system you end up spending a good amount of time troubleshooting freezes or mystery CPU/disk usage.
As of yesterday (this started suddenly) any time Backblaze is performing a backup my whole system gets bogged down for no reason. Was fine days ago, so who knows what automatic update for what app caused it. It's probably an interaction with some other filesystem filter on my system, like Defender or Acronis True Image (which I am stuck using since every other disk imaging tool I've used is worse). Seeing this post on the front page has me wondering whether it's actually Backblaze's fault or it's Acronis, now...
I've previously tracked down random system freezes caused by some part of the NVIDIA driver interacting with one of my monitors, where the first unlucky process on my system to call certain graphics APIs after a boot or wake-from-sleep would cause the video driver to hold a lock and enumerate display modes for 10+ seconds. The end result was a "frozen" PC still responding to input, just unable to send new pixels to any of its displays. The fun part of that one was that profiling would blame these freezes on whatever user mode process was unlucky enough to make that graphics API call - Steam's browser overlay, Visual Studio's WPF rendering, the list goes on. The troubleshooting process for this one was expensive because I got to the point of replacing components before I figured it out.
I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins. My experience using linux on servers and VMs has had some situations like this but I don't know whether the everyday experience just running Linux or OS X on bare metal is actually perfect at this point.
> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins
Friend of mine dailies Arch. He described a few days ago a situation where he stopped being able to take screenshots from one day to the other, eventually finding out the root cause thanks to this fix: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/4127
Whenever Linux package management and shared dependencies are mentioned, people always seem to be quick to mention how it's good for security that you can upgrade dependencies without the consent and knowledge of the developer of each software you're using. To me, issues like this come to mind instead. Or how I heard multiple times acquainted developers complain that packagers modified their software downstream and broke it in some ways, only for users to come complain to them instead of to the distribution.
There's a recent(?) trend of circumventing distro repos and static linking things though, and I work with Go software pretty often, which I believe static links by default: they're a joy to deploy and use. Just nice, single, self-contained binaries. But it's really not the "one true Linux way" from what I can tell, so I'd imagine it's pretty against the grain, which should tell you a lot about the situation overall. I know I'm not itching to switch, and these are only a sliver of my gripes too.
> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins.
IMO these issues occur any time you have third party software that does the job the operating system should be doing itself. Backup/snapshot software (this should be a feature of the file system), clipboard software (the OS clipboard should cover these needs), hot key software, window management, “anti cheat” (or really anything that needs to be a kernel module), antivirus, antimalware, the list goes on.
A properly architected system should have an operating system in charge of managing apps and resources and hardware, and apps which mind their own business. Cross-cutting “horizontal” stuff like what Acronis is doing here are reimplementing things your OS should be doing, and thus aren’t tested along with the OS itself, and are bound to have issues like these.
Or you run macOS and the first party stuff is so buggy (spotlight I’m looking at you) that you’re screwed either way.
Explorer extensions such as the dlls which set the overlay icons used by Google Drive, OneDrive, Git, SVN, etc. are notoriously buggy. We want programmers to provide these extensions, but the documentation is bad and the interfaces are hard to program (measured by the amount of crashes caused by even a Google authored tool). I think Microsoft should have provided a test suite for these implementors to run or a certification program.
Lock the system -> get sued (or at least abused) for locking out third party utility writers. Leave the system open for extension -> poorly written apps by others ruin your reputation. Add telemetry to detect what third parties are doing -> privacy complaints.
Microsoft got in trouble for having double standards in their locks, not for having locks at all.
The complaints I see for Apple generally revolve around not letting normal programs run. Also the way they crippled their firewall settings and gave certain processes a special bypass.
But honestly that's pretty beside the issue here. Programs should be able to interact with icons, but it needs to be sandboxed.
Try Veeam for Windows. It's free and it will not get more light weight that this. Tried Acronis last 15 years ago and they went from amazing to bloated and slow and terrible. I assume it still is.
You don't need anything besides the agent if you're just using it for a single computer. The agent can back up to a drive or network location without being connected to the backup repository.
For personal use of backing up othe local computer you ONLY need Veeam Agent for Windows Free. You install it and then configure your backup.
The step where you took a wrong turn was probably to also install Veeam Backup and Replication? That's basically the orchestrator, but you only need this in an enterprise environment where you have multiple servers to backup. In that scenario you can use the same Agent to backup standalone Windows Servers or Computers.
But in your case that is not needed. You install the Agenda and use just that to backup to (ideally a ReFS) disk or SMB share. I can only suggest to retry it. With ReFS and the forever incremental backups are very, very fast.
Operating system kernels should be modal, with a performance mode,
a maintenance mode, a server mode and a developer mode. Program cache eviction depending on the programs mode of belonging in the machines situation.
Software is crap everywhere. But on Linux I have the tools to quickly track down the bug and fix it, on windows I can maybe slowly track down the bug and attempt binary patching of proprietary software or hope and pray the developers will fix it after I beg them.
This is a privileged position as I am both a Linux expert, and an expert software engineer, and an expert troubleshooter/debugger. If you are not these things then I'm sure things don't work as well.
This is becoming known the software supply chain space, but Acronis software tampers with backups and lots of companies are dropping it. “True Image” couldn’t be further from the truth. Recommend Clonezilla for sure.
When creating a backup, it attempts to condense sectors through some non-standard proprietary algorithm that shifts addressing and tries to roll it up. It wouldn’t be an issue if when restored it reversed this process, but it does not and leaves holes, gaps, or new sectors altogether in the reconstruction. Because of the spaghetti nature of this, the user can only use their software unless they want to reverse engineer the patented algo.
>These files are also missing Product Name, Company Name, and Product Version in the ETW fields and much of this information is also missing from the sigcheck output.
I have no clue what vendors do this, especially MS themselves. Has the exact look of files that were installed by a virus.
This is wrong. Malware authors put in a lot more work to make their software look legitimate, even including valid version information and digital signatures.
Hmm, but if I was a malware author and legitimate software couldn't bother to put in version information maybe I should also not do that so I can blend in better.
There software was so bad. I once had purchased a license. But when I started using, in the setting there was a possible workflow that if you click that button/menu option it will reset the license key. It happened (because I am curious right?) then my copy was no longer valid. I called their customer support and that person treated my like a criminal trying to lie all the way. So explained numerous times and sent them purchase copies and screenshots. After some attempts they issues a new license key (they might have verified their stupid mistake). On top of that, the version I bought did not have a way to delete option. I had to purchase that feature. This was long time ago and I no longer use this sh*.
I use to license Acronis as well and I share your view of the software quality. Since then I moved on to Macrium Reflect: better UI, faster, fewer glitches. It paid off about 9 months ago when a 1TB 970 Pro NVMe failed. Flawlessly restored in about 50 minutes.
I can also attest that Acronis is crap and Macrium software is very high quality. Too bad, though, Reflect Free edition has been discontinued and the paid edition now locks you in a yearly subscription.
And even if you're scared of them removing the ability to restore for free, they released code to handle the new mrimgx format under the MIT license: https://github.com/macrium/mrimgx_file_layout
I don't think anyone who's run Acronis would be surprised at this. The whole thing feels clunky. I had a weird issue where it would crash my Dante audio setup every time it kicked off a backup.
I buy Acronis True Image but I certainly don't install it. I use it for cloning operations mostly.
I would agree with another commenter Veeam's free offering is a great backup choice as long as you have a computer you want to backup separate from your computer doing the backing up.
but they shared symbols for the tishell64 DLL to help us understand what was going on.
This is perhaps the most surprising sentence in this article. A proprietary software company sharing debugging symbols (which are basically the closest thing to source code that isn't source code) when you just ask their support about an issue is something that I'd never expect to happen.
I was surprised also when this happened, but pleased. The trust was nice. The fact that they needed to give me the symbols in order to understand the issue was surprising. Why couldn't they find the calls in their source? Or analyze the trace themselves? Curious.
Symbols for Windows system DLLs has been available for ages, downloadable in one click directly from within Visual Studio. So it's not without a precendent.
Windows ends up being a thousand cuts situation when you have enough software like this installed. If you want a responsive and stable system you end up spending a good amount of time troubleshooting freezes or mystery CPU/disk usage.
As of yesterday (this started suddenly) any time Backblaze is performing a backup my whole system gets bogged down for no reason. Was fine days ago, so who knows what automatic update for what app caused it. It's probably an interaction with some other filesystem filter on my system, like Defender or Acronis True Image (which I am stuck using since every other disk imaging tool I've used is worse). Seeing this post on the front page has me wondering whether it's actually Backblaze's fault or it's Acronis, now...
I've previously tracked down random system freezes caused by some part of the NVIDIA driver interacting with one of my monitors, where the first unlucky process on my system to call certain graphics APIs after a boot or wake-from-sleep would cause the video driver to hold a lock and enumerate display modes for 10+ seconds. The end result was a "frozen" PC still responding to input, just unable to send new pixels to any of its displays. The fun part of that one was that profiling would blame these freezes on whatever user mode process was unlucky enough to make that graphics API call - Steam's browser overlay, Visual Studio's WPF rendering, the list goes on. The troubleshooting process for this one was expensive because I got to the point of replacing components before I figured it out.
I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins. My experience using linux on servers and VMs has had some situations like this but I don't know whether the everyday experience just running Linux or OS X on bare metal is actually perfect at this point.
> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins
Friend of mine dailies Arch. He described a few days ago a situation where he stopped being able to take screenshots from one day to the other, eventually finding out the root cause thanks to this fix: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/4127
Whenever Linux package management and shared dependencies are mentioned, people always seem to be quick to mention how it's good for security that you can upgrade dependencies without the consent and knowledge of the developer of each software you're using. To me, issues like this come to mind instead. Or how I heard multiple times acquainted developers complain that packagers modified their software downstream and broke it in some ways, only for users to come complain to them instead of to the distribution.
There's a recent(?) trend of circumventing distro repos and static linking things though, and I work with Go software pretty often, which I believe static links by default: they're a joy to deploy and use. Just nice, single, self-contained binaries. But it's really not the "one true Linux way" from what I can tell, so I'd imagine it's pretty against the grain, which should tell you a lot about the situation overall. I know I'm not itching to switch, and these are only a sliver of my gripes too.
> I'm curious whether people who daily drive mac or linux encounter these sorts of system configuration gremlins.
IMO these issues occur any time you have third party software that does the job the operating system should be doing itself. Backup/snapshot software (this should be a feature of the file system), clipboard software (the OS clipboard should cover these needs), hot key software, window management, “anti cheat” (or really anything that needs to be a kernel module), antivirus, antimalware, the list goes on.
A properly architected system should have an operating system in charge of managing apps and resources and hardware, and apps which mind their own business. Cross-cutting “horizontal” stuff like what Acronis is doing here are reimplementing things your OS should be doing, and thus aren’t tested along with the OS itself, and are bound to have issues like these.
Or you run macOS and the first party stuff is so buggy (spotlight I’m looking at you) that you’re screwed either way.
Explorer extensions such as the dlls which set the overlay icons used by Google Drive, OneDrive, Git, SVN, etc. are notoriously buggy. We want programmers to provide these extensions, but the documentation is bad and the interfaces are hard to program (measured by the amount of crashes caused by even a Google authored tool). I think Microsoft should have provided a test suite for these implementors to run or a certification program.
Lock the system -> get sued (or at least abused) for locking out third party utility writers. Leave the system open for extension -> poorly written apps by others ruin your reputation. Add telemetry to detect what third parties are doing -> privacy complaints.
There's no winning here.
Microsoft got in trouble for having double standards in their locks, not for having locks at all.
The complaints I see for Apple generally revolve around not letting normal programs run. Also the way they crippled their firewall settings and gave certain processes a special bypass.
But honestly that's pretty beside the issue here. Programs should be able to interact with icons, but it needs to be sandboxed.
Try Veeam for Windows. It's free and it will not get more light weight that this. Tried Acronis last 15 years ago and they went from amazing to bloated and slow and terrible. I assume it still is.
Spent an hour trying to get Veeam to work and it can't connect to an agent installed on the same machine. Sigh. Thanks for the suggestion though.
You don't need anything besides the agent if you're just using it for a single computer. The agent can back up to a drive or network location without being connected to the backup repository.
You added too many steps.
For personal use of backing up othe local computer you ONLY need Veeam Agent for Windows Free. You install it and then configure your backup.
The step where you took a wrong turn was probably to also install Veeam Backup and Replication? That's basically the orchestrator, but you only need this in an enterprise environment where you have multiple servers to backup. In that scenario you can use the same Agent to backup standalone Windows Servers or Computers.
But in your case that is not needed. You install the Agenda and use just that to backup to (ideally a ReFS) disk or SMB share. I can only suggest to retry it. With ReFS and the forever incremental backups are very, very fast.
Clonezilla is another alternative. I haven’t used it in years, but it used to be pretty good.
Operating system kernels should be modal, with a performance mode, a maintenance mode, a server mode and a developer mode. Program cache eviction depending on the programs mode of belonging in the machines situation.
Software is crap everywhere. But on Linux I have the tools to quickly track down the bug and fix it, on windows I can maybe slowly track down the bug and attempt binary patching of proprietary software or hope and pray the developers will fix it after I beg them.
This is a privileged position as I am both a Linux expert, and an expert software engineer, and an expert troubleshooter/debugger. If you are not these things then I'm sure things don't work as well.
Speculation, since I don't have the relevant software:
- the Windows icon cache is dependent on the display configuration (in particular, bit depth, and maybe pixel density)
- unplugging a monitor therefore flushes the icon cache
- the relevant file is an explorer icon overlay handler (which is identified by the registry key one needs to mitigate the problem)
- therefore flushing the icon cache causes a mass refresh
- the handler is probably looking to see if some True Image process is running †
- maybe it needs that to show different icon overlays?
- it's probably also doing that for every icon (i.e. the caching isn't happening across different icons, at least when the cache is flushed)
† in hind sight, this is better done via a named pipe or mutex or something
(Edit: added line breaks)
Further speculation: there's something that's working in n² time
This is becoming known the software supply chain space, but Acronis software tampers with backups and lots of companies are dropping it. “True Image” couldn’t be further from the truth. Recommend Clonezilla for sure.
>Acronis software tampers with backups
In what way?
When creating a backup, it attempts to condense sectors through some non-standard proprietary algorithm that shifts addressing and tries to roll it up. It wouldn’t be an issue if when restored it reversed this process, but it does not and leaves holes, gaps, or new sectors altogether in the reconstruction. Because of the spaghetti nature of this, the user can only use their software unless they want to reverse engineer the patented algo.
And, does it do so when you ask it to do a sector-based backup, ie an image, rather than a file-based backup.
The latter is the default since it's more flexible and requires less space when doing incremental backups AFAIK, but obviously isn't a true image.
>These files are also missing Product Name, Company Name, and Product Version in the ETW fields and much of this information is also missing from the sigcheck output.
I have no clue what vendors do this, especially MS themselves. Has the exact look of files that were installed by a virus.
This is wrong. Malware authors put in a lot more work to make their software look legitimate, even including valid version information and digital signatures.
Hmm, but if I was a malware author and legitimate software couldn't bother to put in version information maybe I should also not do that so I can blend in better.
That might depend on whether you prefer to look unremarkable once you've attracted someone's attention, or to just not attract people's attention.
There software was so bad. I once had purchased a license. But when I started using, in the setting there was a possible workflow that if you click that button/menu option it will reset the license key. It happened (because I am curious right?) then my copy was no longer valid. I called their customer support and that person treated my like a criminal trying to lie all the way. So explained numerous times and sent them purchase copies and screenshots. After some attempts they issues a new license key (they might have verified their stupid mistake). On top of that, the version I bought did not have a way to delete option. I had to purchase that feature. This was long time ago and I no longer use this sh*.
I use to license Acronis as well and I share your view of the software quality. Since then I moved on to Macrium Reflect: better UI, faster, fewer glitches. It paid off about 9 months ago when a 1TB 970 Pro NVMe failed. Flawlessly restored in about 50 minutes.
I can also attest that Acronis is crap and Macrium software is very high quality. Too bad, though, Reflect Free edition has been discontinued and the paid edition now locks you in a yearly subscription.
To be fair, it doesn't really "lock you in": you're still able to restore your backups indefinitely even if you do not renew, just not take new ones.
And even if you're scared of them removing the ability to restore for free, they released code to handle the new mrimgx format under the MIT license: https://github.com/macrium/mrimgx_file_layout
Hasleo Backup is completely free and is a pretty decent alternative to Macrium. I switched to Hasleo after Macrium went to subscription mode.
https://www.easyuefi.com/backup-software/backup-suite-free.h...
I don't think anyone who's run Acronis would be surprised at this. The whole thing feels clunky. I had a weird issue where it would crash my Dante audio setup every time it kicked off a backup.
I buy Acronis True Image but I certainly don't install it. I use it for cloning operations mostly.
I would agree with another commenter Veeam's free offering is a great backup choice as long as you have a computer you want to backup separate from your computer doing the backing up.
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