New bits for "old" computers [11]

After looking yet again (as I must have already done hundreds of times) at where I could put a fourth keyboard on the desk, I cut up a spare piece of melamine shelf and then screwed it to the desk top on the left hand side and that is where the Win10PC's keyboard and mouse now sit. Whereas last time I was going to adapt the keyboard slide on the LHS which I currently use for my drinking cup etc, and got as far as cutting another melamine shelf to the extra width, I am now proceeding with this solution. Although the keyboard is further away this way than is desirable, I have also installed TightVNCserver on the computer and can use Remmina to connect to it from MainPC to make use of it more convenient without having to switch one of the two switchable keyboards to the Windows computer. We have to use VNC because Windows 10 Home Edition does not support RDP. 

I have been editing aerial photo collections in Qgis again and have now come up with a way to script from a QLR file to copy files automatically from a collection. The manual steps are:

1. Open the QLR file in Notepad++ on Win10pc
2. Extract all the <layername> lines by using a Find in Open File command
3. Replace the XML tags with blanks to convert this to just a list of files
4. Save this as a text file
5. Run a simple Powershell script using Get-Content to read the file names from the file and then use Copy-Item to copy all the files from a source folder to a destination folder.

As time goes on I may well use Select-XML to directly convert the XML from the QLR file to a filename and copy as is, the tricky part is to be able to convert paths with forward slashes in them to backslashes and so forth, so in this case the Powershell script has hardcoded paths in it. Works like a charm and, as usual, is saving a lot of disk space. In the most recent case only about 20% of the files (0.1 m Dunedin suburban area) are actually needed and the result is about 10 GB disk space saved.

I still haven't got onto the backup solution but I plan on doing some testing over the next couple of days as I really do need to get this happening.