[Drezha]

Dave Rice wrote:

I think that’s what SHR does so you can add a drive later without having to build an array.

From memory, I didn’t set it up as an SHR volume to start with, as it was a 8TB and 3TB drive in there and each drive was set up separately.

I sold the old Synology the 220+ replaced, so no fancy backup targets for me.

The 8TB should be sufficient for a while I hope, otherwise I’ll either have to upgrade the drives or get a 4 bay NAS! At the minute, I don’t think I’m really using the high end nature of the + models and probably would have been fine with the DS218. However, I guess it’s future proof for now.

I did consider getting a QNAP to see what they could bring to the table but the cheapest ones are probably like the cheapest Synology ones and to probably be avoided. My dad is using my old DS116j (or was it DS115j) though and still finds it fine – though he’s using it purely for storage I think.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Dave Rice wrote:

I didn’t know that, just read up about it. Synology layers BTRFS on top of mdadm (Linux software RAID) and BTRFS RAID isn’t stable enough yet.

That bit me in the backside today. I’d copied the items I wanted to my BTRFS formatted 3TB hard drive, then removed it, put the new 8TB in and reformatted the lot. Put the 3TB in an external enclosure and attached to the NAS – not recognised.

Attached to a Raspberry Pi, not recognised. In the end, Fedora 33 (the latest Fedora, which uses BTRFS as normal) managed to pick it up. Here it’s clear that Synology create a RAID 1 array with a single disk for BTRFS, which is why the disk didn’t pick it up separately.

Now it’s currently transferring it’s data across a USB connection at 20MB/s so its taking a lot longer to move across than expected.

However, thankful the data is still intact – I know for next time to move it to an ext4 formatted drive direct on the NAS or export over the network to any other drive plugged in. :negative:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Dave Rice wrote:

With regards deleting files from the backups, surely if you’ve set a retention policy they will eventually drop out? I can see occasions when retention periods wouldn’t be a good thing though, but that would really be for archives which I do as one offs.

I can’t set rotation on the cheapest C2 cloud backup. The website states:

Plan I protects your data through daily backups with a default retention policy. C2 Storage for Hyper Backup will retain 11 backup versions (one latest, 7 daily, 3 weekly) going back 30 days.

However, my latest backup is still showing a folder that I no longer want included within the storage and seems to be backed up nightly.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

I think I’ve got a 4GB stick in there to match the one already in place, for a total of 6GB. At the minute, I’m not over 1GB, so it’s not really being taxed to much just yet!

C2 is fine – currently on the lowest tier, but may look at moving to the higher level in the future. However, all the major items I want at the minute can be protected by the smaller 300GB tier (that’s all mine and my wife’s photos (65GB) and all my documents (less than 20GB). Other files are thrown in there. The only thing I dislike about it is I can’t remove an item that is no longer required. Yes, I can stop it backing up to start with, but once it’s up there, I can’t delete all instances of it at all. :negative:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Ordered another 8TB drive from Amazon for delivery tomorrow, so I’ll be reformatting everything to put it in to SHR. Almost ordered a DS420+ to replace it with instead!

I’ll double up on my offsite and non Synology backups if there are further issues.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Yeah I went back and read the BTRFS page on Synology site and it’s clearer that I need SHR or RAID to make use of it – I’d basically seen a comment on Reddit today about BTRFS performance on the new Linux kernel, so I did some digging then.

File was corrupt on the gaming PC but I didn’t check the NAS to see if it had propagated, just downloaded a working file from Synology C2 and replaced.

We’ll see what memtest comes up with and it may mean the purchase of another 8TB drive to create a SHR pool.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Hum, something funny might be going on – I found a courrpted file last night on my gaming rig as well (a JPG).

I think I’ll be doing some drive checks on all the machines to see what’s happening. Currently running Memtest on my Synology – it also turns out that I’m not getting the benefit of the BTRFS formatting on there, as I’m not running in RAID (so I’m not getting the repairing corrupted files automatically). That wasn’t made clear when I started :negative:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Yeah, they’ve been issuing refunds to players on XBox and PS4 who want them, because it’s not playing well at all.

I didn’t pre-order in the end – probably wise. Besides, my Christmas holidays are put aside for some Red Dead Redemption 2 that I picked up on sale on Steam this month. :good:  Between that, and trying to learn Blendr for 3D architecture, I should be covered for a bit.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

keith with the teef wrote:

maybe some free DLC.

It might be 2077 before that happens, considering how long it took them to release it initially 😉

But I know what you mean – I finally purchased Fallout 76 a week or two ago for £10 when it was in the Steam sale. Played Fallout 4 for hours, so I’ll see how FO76 goes.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

I got myself a 4K screen over Black Friday. And then promptly run it at 1920×1080 (scaled!). It makes a difference during the day when working, but games I drop back down to 1080p.

On the Minecraft demo’s, ray tracing looked awesome. But I don’t play Minecraft and I don’t have an RTX card so it’s a moot point.

Ignoring the screen resolution, it’s VR that I want to have a go with. I feel that would be great. I’ve got Star Wars Squadrons and I’d love to see VR in that.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Ed P wrote:

One possibility is Windows, if it thinks it is short of space it will delete files without asking. I suspect that if it has been allowed to ‘see’ network files it will do the same: link You may want to check if Apple have the same malign policy!

There are all local files, that downloaded using Resilo, rather than on the network so that could be the case. However, I have about 75% free space still on the Windows machine and the similar on the Mac. Storage sense is off on my laptop, I’d have to check the desktop.

Only thing I can think of is that the Mac one is stored on an external drive and the at one point the drive was disconnected. However, when that occurs, Resilo normally just shuts down and refuses to sync, which is what appeared to happen.

I’ll have to keep an eye on things over the next few days.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

It’s one that I’ve been following, considering that I’m in the fire safety industry. Having worked for one of the main testing houses mentioned in the article (though in a consultancy role, not a testing role), these are huge issues.

Reading the article, it mentions buck passing and the like – that’s something that came up a lot when I was in construction. Facade engineers always passed the issues on to the fire engineers, which was always a joke, as the facade engineers did nothing to earn their fees, trying to pass it on to others (architects to design, fire engineers to confirm fire acceptance). My response was always – if it’s not a tested system, it’s not compliant.

It mentions LABC – I don’t trust them with a barge pole. They’ve approved a sprinkler system as being compliant, though have this has failed the British Standard tests and it has never been issued a compliance certificate – the same firm that manufactures those was threatened with legal action on a number of occasions from my firm at the time for misrepresentation and lying, saying it had passed a test – we hadn’t tested it to BS standards and they weren’t issuing our report in full alongside.

It’s all a huge issue and I feel sorry for those trapped in high rises that are fitted with it and are being given the run around by the firms building it. However, it isn’t just poor materials – shoddy workmanship is also coming to light. The University I work for has recently discovered major issues with fire safety from three buildings they had constructed in 1999. We can’t chase the firms for damages, as they’ve all gone bust and we’re out of time to do so. Construction is a huge mess in the UK and we’re slowly waking up to it.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Dave Rice wrote:

As for transportability, a TP-Link nano travel router or an old MiFi unit would do the job and be powered from a phone charger (I’m thinking about a local WiFi source rather than any internet access).

I have a travel router, so that could work. I guess if I set it at the same IP range and the same wifi SSID, it *should* auto connect and need no further messing around.

That webcam looks reasonable, as we’re doing daily meetings on Teams, so having that could improve matters over my Logitech. However, I think the internet speeds are the drawbacks, as the quality I get on Teams at the minute isn’t great! Download speeds this morning were 4Mbps on a 67Mbps line :negative: Virgin might be double the price, but I don’t think I’d ever had it drop that low.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Have they improved the accessibility of the NUC’s? My 8th gen one wasn’t great, with cables snaking all over the place for the SATA drive – however, the PN50 was dead simple – screw into place and close the lid and it’s all set.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

The PN50 is a cracking little device. I have the 4300U version as well, as it’s currently my daily driver machine for work, teamed up with 16GB RAM and a ADATA NVME 512GB SSD. Quieter than my Intel machine it replaced (which needs to go on eBay).

Only machine I have to get rid of now is my gaming rig – I’m only currently keeping that around as I’m expecting to get my technical report for my chartership approved in January, which means I’ll have to run a lot of CFD models. Better to make use of that, rather than this, my gaming laptop or the Mac Mini! (Gaming laptop is used more now, as I can sit downstairs with the wife in the front room, but still get some games in :good: ).

Out of interest, if they record to microSD, what’s the PC for? Does it offload the data back to the PC itself?

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

The Duke wrote:

I’ve not even got version of Windows for it yet. I was gonna “borrow one” untill I don’t have to.

You don’t need a product key to run Windows.

Apparently.

I don’t know how the digital licensing works but I changed my system and signed in and Windows is using a Pro license that is attached to my account apparently. :scratch:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

I’d been recommended to run h2testw on new microSD cards before use to ensure that they are the correct size.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

Total, utter, unachievable, bo**ocks. If the Government intends to press ahead with its zero carbon electricity generation targets then we won’t have enough power to keep the lights on, let alone charge millions of cars. Pie in the sky ecomentallist pleasing nonsense. IMHO of course 🤣

Doesn’t matter – won’t be this Government’s issue to deal with :whistle:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Interesting. I know Android has been doing that for years – everytime an app is opened etc. A snapshot of my app activity on the 9th! And you need to keep it on to be able to use various Google items.

I’m sure Windows collects similar. I mean looking at the blocked domains in my Pi Hole, the tracking domains are the top 10 blocked sites, so this doesn’t seem that new and seems to be across the board.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Ed P wrote:

Wash my mouth out but the new MacBook Air looks interesting with single core performance that is better than the AMD Ryzen 5900 with a Geekbench score of 1687 vs 1616 for the Ryzen 5900! Of course on the multicore stage the Ryzen eats the MacBook’s lunch and nearly doubles the Macbook score. However for a ‘pad’ this is amazingly good performance. link

I ordered an M1 Mac Mini today :scratch: I’ll see how it goes when it gets here. The Geekbench benchmarks are impressive but then looking at the devices I have, the portables have the best single core scores!

Perhaps the Mac Mini isn’t the best use of the chip – after all, low power consumption etc suits the mobile market. However, this is the cheapest one to try (and education discount applies…) Still a few apps I like using on the Mac and the idea I can use iPad apps on the Mac was also of interest. I’ll see how things work out and would be willing to share the experience.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

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