A standard joke not all that long back was that you could always tell which one was the boss's PC by the "Whiteout" on the monitor.

It's probably still accurate in quite a few places, although in those places you don't often dare to venture much of anything that might be taken as a "joke" about the boss.

With some of the better, or "special purpose" OCR programs now, you can get pretty good recognition on lots of people's handwritten notes. While the recognition is mostly as good as can be expected, most of the OCR stuff I've seen recently still bogs down trying to translate the "dots" when you run a scan of a music score through them. They "eventually" get done, and mostly they figure out which dots are just dots, but it really slows them down.

I have been keeping two external USB (1TB) drives where I kept separate "identical" copies of all the homemade files from all three or four of our home computers, but I recently hit "drive full" errors on those, so I'm in the process of reorganizing what goes where. We're currently down to two working machines, each of which has a "second" spare 2TB HD so I've got two good copies of everything on two separate drives in each, but I'd still like to have a "portable" (external portable USB drive) master for travel times, as soon as I can decide what needs to be on them.

I'm recently running into the (apparently little known) NTFS FCB confusion, in which the drive "loses track" of what's where. It's generally "temporary," and corrects itself if you reboot; but I do lots of "F5" checks when it fails to display folder changes, and get almost daily "Windows Explorer has stopped working and will be closed" messages. So far as I can tell no data has been lost, but stuff that goes places other than where it says it's going have been frequent enough to be a "minor(?) annoyance."

Being safe ain't really all that easy.

John