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.

>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.

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)

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.

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.

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 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.