Been having some fun with my home network. \u00a0Fun finally, because it has been not fun at all for quite a while. \u00a0I’m now winning on both of my NAS devices, which is letting me feel a bit more optimistic about returning to a sensible backup flow. \u00a0Been sort of commando for several months now, and that’s not good. \u00a0If you’ve ever been stung by data loss, you know how important backups are. \u00a0But there’s a lot of real estate between knowing what you need and getting it to work.<\/p>\n
My overall plan has been to do frequent backups to the first NAS, which I also want to serve content. \u00a0Then that thing should do weekly backups to a slow, bulletproof NAS. \u00a0The NAS-to-NAS backup has never worked. \u00a0I have never gotten to the point where it was possible. \u00a0I understand it may be difficult, but I’m at least to a point now where both of the NASs are accessible from all of my machines, save a bit of research on NAS-to-NAS of course.<\/p>\n
My fast NAS (named “Tenshi”) is a WD My Book Live with 2TB total, and no RAID going on. \u00a0so 2TB, and I want to keep a great deal of that free for good luck, which is not a technical term, but will have to suffice. \u00a0After all, the objective is to avoid bad luck, which is catastrophic data loss. \u00a0Tenshi is where I would LIKE to have my iTunes library, which may still have to be managed by the MacBook Pro, a house-bound machine with a dead battery and a nearly full hard drive. \u00a0There’s nothing wrong with the machine other than the battery, and it’s still plenty powerful, but I could not get past some stage of beginner-ism with it, and hence have never really warmed up to actually using the darned thing. \u00a0 \u00a0More on the later. \u00a0but iTunes is difficult to run as a networked home media server. so i have come up with what I think will work: let the MBP run the library on the NAS from the point of view of making changes. \u00a0Let everybody else connect through the embedded iTunes server present on the NAS itself, in read-only. \u00a0The only issue I foresee is contention between the MBP and the NAS server for things like play counts. \u00a0Finally, I will make an “iTunes_Inbox” folder up on the NAS, and the MBP will watch that as its default “add the contents of this folder to the library”. \u00a0Then everything else will dump media into that folder. \u00a0This way, only the MBP instance of iTunes is updating the library, even if the media came in through my Amazon downloader on the Windows 7 box.<\/p>\n
On both of the NASs, I tried to create role-oriented accounts (guest, itunes_user, macbackup, and so forth), but managing those things rapidly exceeded my give-a-darn, as when it got too complex, I just wiped them out and rebuilt. \u00a0At one point, I had forgotten how to log into my bulletproof slow NAS (“Shatura”), which had me stalled on this stuff for a long time. \u00a0Then in doing my homework, I learned that doing a factory reset on a Promise SmartStor NS2300N will NOT affect the data on the drives, just wipe out the user \/ group \/ admin configs. \u00a0Super! \u00a0Reset it was, and when I then saw “file system error” messages, I was pretty steamed. \u00a0But let’s face it; I was not about to manually backup all the stuff on there just in case a reset would hash it. \u00a0After all, that is the BACKUP itself, and I have never had enough confidence in it (that is, in my setup of the system) to remove unconsolidated versions of what I copied up to it. \u00a0And as this is supposed to be the slow backup of the backup, I felt that anything present there was already in hand elsewhere. \u00a0I knew I was never going to go to the trouble of actually verifying that, so the decision was either plunge ahead or give up altogether.<\/p>\n
So plunge ahead it was, I did the reset, got the error messages, and then was relieved to learn that all it wanted was for me to issue the command to recover the RAID. \u00a0I used to know more about this stuff; now I just know that RAID 1 works quite well on my NAS. \u00a0Everything was there. \u00a0All I had to do was create a guest user, turn on Windows file sharing (Mac, Unix, FTP and other options are available as well), apply the sharing service to the recovered shares, and assign the guest user access to them. \u00a0Then went back to the Mac and the PC and taught them how to log in as that guest. \u00a0So there I am, up and running on both NASs, but with no clue how to automate a NAS-to-NAS weekly backup. \u00a0haven;t really done my homework on that yet; I’m sure it’s not rocket science.<\/p>\n
About that MacBook Pro…<\/p>\n
I’ve come largely off the Mac wagon, and while I still love the hardware and respect the tech, I’ve simply never felt at home on mac the way I did in the days of System 7. \u00a0That’s right, 8 was foreign, 9 was incomprehensible, and X should really be called about three different families of OS by now. \u00a0I loved Jaguar, which I think was 10.2, and I greatly like the 10.5 – 10.6 era. \u00a0I’m writing now from 10.6.8, but I’m coming to it using VNC Viewer from Real VNC, which I heartily recommend<\/a>. \u00a0So while the MBP is running Chrome, through which I’m typing this on the blog, I’m actually typing physically on my hp Envy 14, which I adore, and which runs Windows 7, which is a high point for MS.<\/p>\n I have a MacBook Air, but it’s one of the early small ones, with a stunningly short battery life. \u00a0That wouldn’t be so bad except that there remain zero options for mobile power. \u00a0Once the chintzy little battery is exhausted, you cannot connect to an external battery, and you cannot swap in a fresh battery. \u00a0Sealed unit, Apple power only, put it back in the bag, you’re done.<\/p>\n WELL, I’m just rambling, and I do want to get back to my NAS project, so I’ll simply cut this off here. \u00a0I can’t tell you how much the prospect of success on the home server front has brightened my outlook. \u00a0Heck, I’m even writing again. \u00a0See? \u00a0There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it is called regular backups.<\/p>\n Been having some fun with my home network. \u00a0Fun finally, because it has been not fun at all for quite a while. \u00a0I’m now winning on both of my NAS devices, which is letting me feel a bit more optimistic about returning to a sensible backup flow. \u00a0Been sort of commando for several months now, and that’s not good. \u00a0If you’ve ever been stung by data loss, you know how important backups are. \u00a0But there’s a lot of real estate between knowing what you need and getting it to work.<\/p>\n My overall plan has been to do frequent backups to the first NAS, which I also want to serve content. \u00a0Then that thing should do weekly backups to a slow, bulletproof NAS. \u00a0The NAS-to-NAS backup has never worked. … Continue reading