A Frustrating Journey
I’ve been a fan and longtime user of Dropbox. I even paid the the 50GB plan. That subscription coincided with my increased iPad usage and Dropbox was a great way to get files to it. That subscription is going to expire in May and I’d rather not renew it and save the money. So it was time to see if I really needed the 50GB and if there were alternatives. I'm not tied to a single solution and it's a good time to see what my options are. Read the rest »
When leaving the house today I packed both my MacBook Air and iPad but then considered the weight and decided t take just one. Which one was it? Read the rest »
Some recent news stores hit on my pet peeves, AT&T buying T-Mobile, Yahoo saving data for my benefit, Apple tracking (and the reaction), beta hardware and Dropbox privacy. Read the rest »
For a limited time you can transfer any domain for $10, even those that are typically more, such as my .CO domains. Read the rest »
With the loss of Drive Extender in WHS and my search through RAID alternatives I’ve noticed a lot of people equate RAID (and RAID like solutions) with backup. RAID is not backup. RAID provides redundancy for one hardware component to improve uptime (and RAID 0 doesn’t even provide that). In the case of Windows Home Server Version 1 the folder duplication feature has the same limitations of RAID 1. Redundancy, not backup. I kept all my WHS v1 files duplicated because it would have been a huge pain to lose one non-duplicated drive in the pool and cause a lot of down time. So I duplicated it all – and still did backups. So why isn't RAID comparable to a backup? Read the rest »
I use Bento a bit and I’ve been using a symbolic link to point to the database in a Dropbox folder. This has worked pretty well, except occasionally the symbolic link would break. I recently changed things up a bit and eliminated the symbolic link. Read the rest »
I spent Saturday migrating my Windows Home Server Rc1 server to the final gold release of Windows Home Server 2011. This was not an upgrade in any sense of the word but a complete re-install of the OS. If all went well the data would survive. I could flatten the OS drive and re-install it, then point everything to the surviving data drives. Despite some careless corner cutting that added, rather than saved, time it all went as planned. You can read the details here. Read the rest »
Sometimes I never learn. Ran into two self-inflected speed bumps while rebuilding my Windows Home Server 2011. 1. Read The Messages – I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out why WHS 2011 didn’t like the drivers for the RAID controller. Then I finally read the message and didn’t jump to a conclusion. The problem was it couldn’t find my eSATA connected DVD drive. A switch to USB and all was well. 2. Power is important. Balance a power brick near the power strip’s power switch and it’s sure [...] Read the rest »
Microsoft has released Windows Home Server 2011 to Microsoft Technet and MSDN subscribers. I started my Technet download and plan to install the final release on my server this weekend. I’m hoping I’ll be able to wipe out the OS drive but keep the files on the data drive and just re-share them. Tedious to recreate all those shares, but quicker than restoring terabytes from backups. Read the rest »
I’d recently mentioned that the performance of my WHS 2011 box wasn’t up to what I expected, and worse, it was inconsistent. Well, Saturday morning it was absolutely terrible, with constant timeouts when I tried to access files on the server. Read the rest »