Category Archives: PC

Tips: How to automate OwnCloud files synchronization on Windows with WinSCP


I had a task to automate customer files backup from Windows 10 desktop to NextCloud server. The main idea to keep offline backup that will be updated automatically few times a week (not every day). Main requirement for this was to reduce human interaction with the process as much as possible and exclude some files from backup process all together.
Initially I was not concerned about this – after all there is official Nextcloud Windows desktop client along with command line tool, ownCloud desktop client is also compatible and also has command line tool included, so I thought to myself out of these two I should be able to put together some kind of automation.
Well, to my dismay both official clients proved to be completely useless in unattended automation. Whatever webDAV protocol limitation there were, both command line clients had it, for example simple task of synchronizing single directory, say d:\testsync to remote/testsync was impossible because neither client could create 1st level folder on remote server. It could be underlying limitation or bug of Qt implementation of WebDAV protocol, but figuring that out was out of scope of my task.
I needed reliable and compact (this is not the requirement but always welcome, considering that official clients were dragging with them about 100Mb of Qt core libraries and are useless for my purposes) WebDAV client for Windows with automation and I needed it yesterday.
Then, I discovered that WinSCP supports WebDAV and allows scripting advanced enough to help me with my task.
After some testing I cam up with the following system:

  1. CMD script started by Task Scheduler, executes WiSCP console tool with the script, in the loop until it exits with “success” result

  2. WinSCP console util executes script that synchronizes local storage with NextCloud server

    filemask covers exclusions

This solution synchronizes about 200Gb of data from single Windows every 2-3 days. It’s pretty fast, compact and the best part of it is that it transfers only changed files. Case closed.

Tips: How to make Google Chrome to use less RAM


It’s no news – everybody knows that, especially serious web surfers who have many tabs open – sooner or later if you will not restart your browser completely, no matter how much RAM do you have on your computer, Google Chrome will consume it all and start crashing – partially by killing extension processes or completely – by killing/trashing multiple tab processes. Google developers are constantly working on improvements trying to make Chrome use less RAM but so far they have mixed results.
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Windows: What do I want to see as default browser

Why Did I bother with it at all?

As I wrote before it is more convenient and secure to have something small, fast and feature limited as your default browser (valid decision for all OSes out there).
Well times go by and nice small Qtweb got outdated with development on it stopped about 6 years ago and new standards (namely SSL/TLS) and new vulnerabilities came out, so I decided
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Windows: Set lightweight web browser as MS windows default web browser application.

qtwebI was thinking the other day – it’s not really safe to have MS windows default browser set to MS Internet Explorer, so any URL you accidentally click will be open with it. For the work related activity I user portable browsers. But what about everything else – this is not really safe no matter how many MS security updates are published every week.
So, I decided to find something really small and “feature-poor” to assign it to the default browser.
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Rant: Keep your critical data local

I think it’s about time I’ll add some personal rant to this blog to add some personal touch to it. Just few words about critical data storage at modern times.

I had a customer server disk failure the other day. Nothing extraordinary about that – old server circa 2006 or 2008 happily humming on old IDE western digital’s 160Gb softraid mirror.
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Adaptec RAID arcconf – creating array from Linux command line

adaptecOne of our customers decided to add 2 more disks to his Adaptec 5085 SATA RAID controller and asked me to create RAID1 array. Of course not at the time when I could easily do it from the controller BIOS so I had to resort to Adaptec arcconf command line tool.
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Trimming down LibreOffice Portable

LibreOffice Portable was published on Jan 27 2011. In many ways it is better then previous OpenOffice portable 3.2 but still leaves some room for improvement. Like removing unused language resources.
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VPN from Vmware Guest OS on windows 7

I have couple of Vmware VMs that I am carrying with me from computer to computer and using on regular basis. One of these VMs is used for corporate PPTP VPN.
After my last transition to Windows 7 this VPN stopped working. It took me some time to find the solution to this problem. Read more »

Register any browser as Windows7 default (including portable)

As the matter of choice I’m using only portable versions of non-MS browsers – Chromium portable, FireFox Portable, Opera@USB.

Everything was nice and dandy while I was using WinXP. Not so easy with Windows7 – let me explain how you can control list of default browsers with simple registry files.
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Accessing Vmware guest OS behind NAT from another computer

Sometimes you have to do things that make sense only to you. And by no way approved by the software manufacturer.
I needed to get access to Vmware Guest OS, behind Vmware NAT interface from another computer.

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