Between 6-10 hours of what?

edit: oh, you mean the xkcd, LOL. Well let me know if it works out for you haha

Some BIOSes have trouble booting anything other than Windows, so some distros default to clobbering the Windows Boot Manager and trying to manage everything from GRUB. It sounds to me like this is what happened to you except it somehow got borked.

If the Windows install is still present on your drive it should be possible to restore the Windows Boot Manager. Then you won’t be able to boot Linux but you’ll at least be able to get into Windows.

Try booting off Windows install media and running Startup Repair using the following instructions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/performance/windows-boot-issues-troubleshooting#method-1-startup-repair-tool

If that doesn’t work try one of these solutions:

https://superuser.com/questions/460762/how-can-i-repair-the-windows-8-efi-bootloader

https://superuser.com/questions/612830/how-to-reinstall-windows-boot-manager-on-efi-partition

Good luck!

Also relevant xkcd

Belgium has them

I believe if you create a crontab on a systemd system, it actually synthesizes systemd timers from the crontab entries

Yeah Synology is pretty good with that kind of stuff (we use one at work). They’ve really just got a Linux system with custom management tools on top. Of course for DIY purposes, self-building is still cheaper and more flexible though.

Interesting blog!

Clicked on your NAS article (one of the first linked ones) and spotted an error… you write that Synology NAS boxes don’t use standard RAID, but they do. They have official docs up on how to hook them up to a standard Linux system for disaster recovery (it’s just Btrfs or ext4 on mdadm RAID).

Probably not super relevant for you or most readers, but just thought I’d point it out :)

But it is a computer.