A Frustrating Journey
Recent events had me thinking about what would happen if my RAID controller died or the OS became corrupt? I’ve yet to test a server restore. It’s a long weekend and now’s as good as anytime to test. If I need to reinstall and manually recreate users and shares I have the time. Recreating share and users would never be fun, but at least it would be a time of my choosing. So what did I learn? Read the rest »
The first Trail Log of May brings a recap of my website changes and iPad issues along with a quick update on the new software I'm using. Read the rest »
I woke up this morning and connected my iPad to iTunes. iTunes saw my iPad differently and turned it into an iPhone. Complete with ringtones. Unfortunately it no longer allowed it to run iPad apps and removed them all. So it was time to dig into the iPad backups and fine an older one where it was still an iPad. I managed to find one and get my iPad's personality restored. Read the rest »
The latest issue of The OS Quest Trail Log brings new of a website redesign in progress, some home networking changes, a new printer and the beginning of the evaluation of some new backup software. Read the rest »
At the beginning of the month I wrote about my Windows Home Server hard drive problems and at the time I was waiting for WHS to finish removing the bad drive from its storage pool. When I posted the article I was letting Windows Home Server run through the drive removal process while I slept. I had pulled the plug on the bad drive since it brought the server to its knees and was now trying to remove the traces of it from the pool. When I woke up in [...] Read the rest »
One of the problems with having a Windows Home Server with 12 hard drives is that hard drives do fail and there’s a dozen chances for that to happen. Add to that the 18TB of data those drives can hold and things are further complicated. The odds are not in my favor and it’s only a matter of time. I’d been thinking about that recently and had just begun looking at ways to monitor the drive health when I came across some health problems while testing out some tools. I [...] Read the rest »
Google currently has a deal going that offers a free Eye-Fi card when you lease 200GB of storage for them for a year. When I first saw it it seemed like a pretty good deal, and I hate to pass up a good deal. But it’s less of a deal if I don’t really need the space and won’t use the card. So that got me thinking about my options. The space is split between Gmail and Picasa. I’m not even close to my Gmail limit and I’m not currently [...] Read the rest »
While my server image gets backed up daily by Slicehost, and my web files get backed up daily by me, there’s a potential gap in my WordPress database backup strategy. I back it up whenever I think of it but since it’s a manual process it’s done less and less frequently. If my database gets corrupt my only option is to restore the last server image unless I happened to do a WordPress backup recently. While pretty quick, it’s also a bit drastic. So it’s time to remedy the situation. [...] Read the rest »
I’ve been a Mozy fan and user for a couple of years and had a paid subscription, at least until I recently cancelled it. At some point my backups stopped working. My tech support experience didn’t go well. While working on the issue I was backing things up to Amazon S3 (via Jungle Disk). After all the files were backed up to S3 and the Mozy issue remained unresolved so I cancelled the subscription. I will admit I didn’t dedicate a great deal of time to the problem although I [...] Read the rest »
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. RAID (including mirroring) is not backup and here’s why. While I have Windows Home Server’s file duplication and my Drobo, they don’t eliminate the need to backup. Read the rest »