The Corner

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Compared to what I read elsewhere, I don’t have much to backup size wise. I read of people with TB’s of data. I have GB’s, and probably only around 250-300GB. Photos. Mp3′s. Scripts and code I’d like to save. Financial bits.

It’s all automated (see: here) and works really, really well. My problem isn’t with Mozy or with Truecrypt. It’s the file size.

My backup consists of this, mostly:
~50 documents/PDFs
~3000 MP3′s
2 40gb TC containers [One is videos, one is the wife's photos]
1 100gb TC container [my photos]

That 100gb container has yet to fully backup and, oddly, it doesn’t seem to “Pause” like it says it should. Everytime it seems to start over at zero, even though the file hasn’t changed or even been opened in months.

The Mozy backup of that 100gb file made it to 8% once, but Mozy was such a resource and bandwidth hog, I had to pause it. That was after 4 solid days of having ~100% of the PC and bandwidth resources to itself (I was out of town). When it started again, it had to re-transcode the file and start from 0. I don’t get it.

That file is my photos, arguably the most important thing I’d like to backup. It’s frustrating that it hasn’t completed yet.

Info on the file: Of the total 100gb filesize, around 60 are actually occupied. I had to leave room to grow. My photos are arranged root\date (nas\2010-12-03, for example). Whenever new files are added, there will be a new folder. This presents a problem in writing the script as I won’t be able to use static names. It will have to be something like

Otherwise I’ll ended up having to modify the script everytime I import a new photo. That’s not likely to happen.

My options are:
- Take a longer vacation next time to let this 100gb file complete, which honestly isn’t a bad idea.
- Reconfigure the way I save photos. I could use years. That would probably limit this down to less than 40gb per year, I’d imagine.
- Reconfigure the script to work in 50gb blocks, either somehow in the script or with zip files. This seems like a bad idea since the files will need to be completely reuploaded instead of just “what’s changed”. There would be huge, unnecessary transfers taking place, hogging bandwidth.

Looks like I have a weekend project moving photos around and reconfiguring scripts.

From email today:

Dear ,

Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

While this policy takes effect for new MozyHome customers starting today, your MozyHome Unlimited subscription is still valid for the duration of your current 2 year term. Your new plan will take effect on your first renewal after March 1, 2011.

…

No more unlimited backup space. Kinda sucks. Happy that I literally JUST locked in my plan about a week ago.

My home network is currently a bit of a mess. Not too bad, but since I’ll be physically relocating shortly, I figure it’s probably best to wait until the move to just sort it all out. But there is one thing that cannot wait: off-site backups of photos and videos. I have a RAID 0 NAS setup and it is where we store ALL our photos and videos, however I wanted something off-site in case of the worst.

My requirements:

• Off-site – If the house caught fire, I would lose most of my photos and videos.
• Fully automated – I don’t want to try to remember to do this. I won’t.
• Encrypted – While I use a 20+ character password for my Mozy account, I didn’t want their employees (or worse) snooping
• As cheap, but as reliable, as possible – Mozy offered Unlimited storage for ~$44/year (promo code: NEXT)
• Low maintenance – I didn’t want to spend the little bit of down time I have maintaining file servers and updating OS’s.

I had researched the online backup suites: Mozy, Carbonite, etc. and since I had a positive experience with their Mozy Pro product on another job, I went with the Mozy Home software. I especially liked the Unlimited aspect of it all as their Pro software is priced by the size of your data transfer. As my backup size will likely continue to grow, I didn’t want to continue upping my monthly fee. Using the 15% off promo code, it works out to about $44/year. That was acceptable to me based on what I was backing up.

Here’s the How-To

Remeber: You only set this up once!

A couple requirements, first:

1. A Mozy Home account. I suppose this will work with any backup solution, however I’m using Mozy in this demo.
2. TrueCrypt – Needed for encrypting the file [Free. Here.]
3. Extra hard drive space – I had an old 500gb USB drive I’ll be using. It really only needs to be as large as what you want to backup.
4. RoboCopy. Available already in Win7, can be downloaded for other Win versions.
5. A small DOS batch script to manage all the leg work.
6. A folder to store the above file and it’s log files in. I use c:\maint in this demo

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the above tools, it’s time to create a Truecrypt volume. Go ahead and open Truecrypt and press the Create Volume button. Follow along with the wizard. One thing I’d like to note is that the smaller you can make your Truecrypt volume size, the better. I initially thought that going with a single 250gb volume would be great. And it would. The problem I ran into is that it would take at least a week to get all that data to Mozy. Granted, subsequent backups would likely run much, much faster, but files that large take forever. Instead, I divided my files into 20gb containers. One for photos, one for videos, one for my wife’s photos, etc. I also created a small 25mb volume to hold all the scripts.

This is all controlled from a single batch file, below:

If you’d like to use this, just copy and paste it into notepad and save it as whatever.bat. Be sure to change the file locations and add your Truecrypt volume password. Save then double click it to run. This will take a long time to run the first time, depending on how many files, how large, network conditions, etc. Subsequent backups run much quicker as only changes and new files require action.

But… what’s that PING line doing?

It’s pinging the local machine to buy Truecrypt time to mount the drive. You can adjust  the “3″ to the number of seconds you need, roughly.

Check your Truecrypt volume. Did the files copy? If so, and you don’t see any errors in the log file (20gbc.log in this example), you’re good to go. Set up a new Windows Scheduled Task to run the batch file nightly or weekly and sleep soundly. Your files are now safely being moved into the proper Truecrypt container.

All that’s left to do is to have Mozy Home back them up.

I could take this further and just disable the Mozy Home client and then call the backup via command line in the above script. That would kick off the entire backup process at a time I specify, vs the constant monitoring of Mozy.

It looks like a lot of folks are getting into putting internet connected web cameras in their home and office. Like most other things on the internet, a lot of people don’t seem to realize that care should be taken with anything hooked up to the internet.

With cameras, a little google-fu can show you the login page for a specific web cam. Of course, there is no login, or most people use the default. Those are easily found online.

My google search:   inurl:view/index.shtml

Lots of cameras come up and are viewable. Some controllable, even. Grand Valley State University’s came up. Here I was, looking at what appeared to be a StarBucks counter there based on the green aprons the employees are wearing. I watched the employees change out the cash drawer.

GVSU Starbucks:  http://148.61.139.229/view/index.shtml

With the IP info, I could probably find more there. I changed the google search to: inurl:view/index.shtml  148.61

And here we go:

Overlooking some path: http://148.61.97.229/view/index.shtml

Overlooking a courtyard areas: http://148.61.134.229/view/index.shtml

A different view of the same courtyard above: http://148.61.151.202/view/index.shtml

Field house?   http://148.61.63.218/view/index.shtml

Clocktower: http://148.61.37.229/view/index.shtml

Student Union type area?   http://148.61.253.219/view/index.shtml

A look towards housing: http://148.61.161.209/view/index.shtml

Clocktower closeup: http://148.61.142.228/view/index.shtml

I’m sure there’s more at GVSU.

The problem here isn’t that these are online but, are GVSU’s cameras really needed by anyone in the public? I could see maybe sharing this info out on the universities LAN, but the internet seems a bit much. Even password protecting the feeds to the outside world would be a step in the right direction.

Of course, GVSU shouldn’t be the only one in the spotlight here. I saw a jewelry store in Asia somewhere. It would be easy to see when they were open or closed. Or even how many employees were in the store. There’s lots and lots of businesses with cameras online…

And there’s the ones that should be online. Like beaches or any tourist destination, really. Who would like to know if it’s sunny at the beach? Or maybe how bad traffic is going to be on the way home from work? There’s a lot of potentially good uses behind internet connected IP cameras. Sadly, I don’t think most people consider the downsides when making the connection.

Dumped the HERO, got an EVO.

GREAT phone, especially compared to the EVO. Highly recommend the upgrade to anyone still holding out with that HERO. What a piece of …

This phone is a gigantic POS.

When dialing, after pressing CALL, it can take up to 30 seconds to connect the call. The phone just sits there like you missed the button. So, you press it again. No you have this person on both line1 and line2.

And don’t even try to use that HANG UP button on the phone. It will lag and you will inevitably call the person right back as that HANG UP button becomes the CALL button again. Bad UI.

I’ve had it in to the Sprint store for repairs, removed nearly every application, purchased a specific memory card that is supposed to make it faster, etc. Nothing works.

I guess that either the hardware isn’t up to the Android OS it’s running or that the radios in this phone are just shit. Either way, there’s lots of complaints on the web about it and Sprint is doing nothing to resolve. Multiple calls to them result in “Just wait for your upgrade”. Missing business calls and being unable to make calls, however, is making me “Just want to jump ship”.

Stay away from this phone!

Disclosure: I’ve been a Sprint customer for 10 years now…

I love LastPass.

http://lastpass.com/

LastPass let’s me forget all my user names and passwords. I just need to remember one password. The last password I’ll ever remember, they say. It’s a cross platform browser plugin (Firefox, Chrome and IE | Win/Mac/Lin) and is tightly integrated into the actual web page.

When I start up my browser, I typically have gmail set as the home page. Since I have that saved in LastPass, it gets loaded and prompts me for my username and password, as shown below.

Once that’s taken care of, I can view all my accounts or just get right to it.

At any time, I can go to my vault and view all my usernames and passwords:

The search feature on this has become a lifesaver with all the accounts I’ve managed to collect.

It’s FREE! Or, if you’d like to use it on your phone, it costs $12/year. That is cheap security!

Have you ever wanted to make one of those panorama photos that you sometimes see at art fairs or a nerdy friend’s house? I’ll show you how.

Like this:

[Click any of the photos for larger sizes]

I made that shot of the Grand Canyon with 4 photos and used a program called AutoStitch to put them all together. The hardest part is taking the photos. Basically, you can take as many as you want, but each one should overlap another in some way. I tend to overlap them about 20%. The above was made with these photos:

After I took them, I didn’t do any adjusting just yet. I just opened AutoStitch, went to File>Open

Navigate to the folder with your images and SINGLE click on the first one. While holding down the shift key on your keyboard, click on the last image in your series. Press the Open button.

Autostitch will do it’s magic and line everything up for you and create one giant image.

Once it’s done, your combined panorama photo will be displayed. It’s saved in the same directory as your images (named pano.jpg).

Autostich may be downloaded here: http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Another crazy error. The client was attempting to edit MetaData and gets the above error. The text doesn’t really offer any help:
“The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support ActiveX controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled.”

Since I’m positive the machines here support ActiveX, even in our ancient IE 6 environment, it has to be this datasheets component. But she has Office 11 installed. She should be good to go, right?

Apparently not. Microsoft has a KB Article about this and refer you to download “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components”. As of now, the direct download link is: right here