Microsoft can start touching me again

After I swore at Windows 10 for getting too close, now it seems to be maliciously complying. Some of this could lead to serious loss.

I am running Windows 1809. Twice recently I’ve discovered that various scheduled tasks were not running:

Optimize drives utility

This is cropped from the tool once known as Defragment. Now that we have solid state drives, it has been retituled “optimize”. Despite being scheduled for weekly optimization, it went 34 days (almost 5 seven day weeks) without running. I just checked again and it’s been 10 days. I forced the two partitions to optimize and nothing untoward happened.

File History options. Edited to remove quiet information.

This one is more serious. I had changed the password for a share on my NAS and Windows neglected to tell me it wasn’t able to back up files there anymore. Not shown is what happened earlier, when my NAS was unreachable for some now-forgotten reason and I had gone 3 months without a backup.

I know from experience that when Windows 7 hit an error backing up files, or missed its target run time by more than a few days, it used Action Center to alert the user. I have not seen any attempt by any part of 10 to draw my attention these three kinds of problems when they were ongoing.

I know the no-longer-called-that EULA limits Microsoft’s liability legally here, but it doesn’t limit this reputation liability if someone very famous and very loud loses vital stuff even though they Do The Right Thing by scheduling regular backups.

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