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I posted this call for help on SmallNetBuilder.com, since that’s one of the smartest, most knowledgeable communities on the Internet for finding out what to do with small, home networks. But I figure I ought to cross-post it here too, in the hopes that someone else might end up here instead. Your help is appreciated!

I came over here looking to just mention my experience with FreeNAS the last few weeks, and lo – Tim’s asking about RAID recovery. Slightly freaky.

I had my FreeNAS box go south on me over the last couple of days and I thought I’d just share two things I’ve learnt from the experience. A little background first: for over a year, I’ve been running FreeNAS 0.6x on a home-built Celeron 430-based machine, four SATA drives for storage via software RAID, a throwaway IDE drive for the OS. The basic setup was two RAID1 arrays joined together as a JBOD, a decision I have come to regret, but thus it was, thus it is. So what have I learnt?

1. RAID recovery does not work. There is inevitably something that will go wrong. In my case, two things went horribly wrong. First, even though I could read FreeNAS’ native UFS formatted file system, I couldn’t recover any of the disks because FreeNAS partitions using the GPT partition structure, and NOT the more common MBR partition structure. Second, because of my decision to JBOD the arrays, the file system was partially on the first array, and partially on the second. No recovery software I found could handle this setup.

2. RAID is not a backup, so backup, backup, backup, or don’t give a damn. Because of my inherent paranoia, I’ve been copying stuff from other computers on to the NAS, in the hopes that everything doesn’t go south all at the same time. The net result of the NAS crash is that we’ve lost: my current resume (and I’m pretty sure I have it in my email somewhere), the current network map (not that difficult to recreate, as I have older ones around), and two bits of software (which I can re-download and re-request keys for). I’m sure we’ll discover a few other things that have gone missing over a few weeks, but it’s not bad. So data loss is not the issue here – but time and convenience is. It was very simple for me to go to my software share and reinstall some piece of software, or to go to the music share and stream some music. That’s all on hold. Moreover, I’m currently missing a safety net, in case something else should go sour.

I’m going to give some thought as to what to do next – and your comments are welcome and appreciated. One option that I am going to rule out before someone suggests it is reinstall FreeNAS. This is the third time in as many years that I’ve had something go abruptly wrong, with no explanation, even though it’s apparently a known issue in the current nightly releases, and must exist earlier as I was running an earlier build. My time is not worth another FreeNAS install, though I’ve loved using it when things are going well. The fact is, there is no reason an orderly shut-down should result in chaos when brought back up again.

Options that I’ve come up with so far:
1. OpenFiler. I’m told this is a painful OS to administer, but a pleasure to use. I’m not sure I want to necessarily learn yet another OS to just have my files available everywhere. On the other hand, my previous experience indicates that it supports a significantly larger set of features than FreeNAS, including one thing that FreeNAS fails at – the ability to use (slightly) different size disks.

2. Windows Home Server. Testing here and elsewhere indicates that WHS is faster than its alternatives, and very user-friendly. However, the lack of a web-based administration front-end means that I’m stuck to using a PC running Windows to administer it, which is not an option. Microsoft also rubs me the wrong way philosophically, though I’m willing to put aside monetary and philosophical concerns if the damn thing just works and allows me to upgrade as larger hard drives become available.

3. Buy a BYOD NAS like the QNAP or Synology devices. Yes, that’s nice. It’s also several hundred dollars, and locking into a storage vendor’s options. What I mean by this last thing: codec support missing for video files, or some proprietary file system, or, worst of all, a feature that’s locked out because you’ve not paid for some annual subscription. Yes, there are relatively standard x86 computers inside some of them and no, I’m still not convinced. Unless someone has had a successful experience recovering a device, the trade-off is not worth it.

4. Forget it. No network-based storage. Expand local storage with a local RAID (or RAID-like) array, and use my Mac OS X based machine as a server to share out the files. I’m most tempted by this option – where this means buying a Drobo. I’ve heard both good things and bad things about it – no one I know has ever had an issue with their Drobo, but there are enough horror stories on the internet about Drobos going south that I don’t know whether I’m living in a statistical fluke.

5. Something else. This is where you all come in. Surely this can’t be the entirety of the options. You’ll notice that all of the options are those that keep the device (and data!) under my control; that’s a (strong) preference, but not an absolute requirement – provided strong encryption and incremental backup are both possible.

Thanks for listening. And remember to do your backups.

I’ve been meaning to write a whole bunch of smaller entries over the last few weeks, but judging by the size of the draft queue, I guess I’ve not got them all ready to the point where I want to publish them. So rather than have ten or fifteen longer entries, I’m just going to a spare parts entry, mainly based off other stuff I’ve been reading lately.

1. Unplggd had an interesting entry about the downside of digital. I can’t find the other blog post I came across talking about that, but I found myself agreeing that an all-digital world can be … problematic. For example, NASA can’t find the tapes it made a mere 40 years ago of what I consider to be one of the five most important milestones in human history. But we can read ancient Egyptian poetry. My two pence addition to this is that one complication that no ancient Egyptian ever had to deal with was DRM – looking at the past 15-20 years, when data has literally exploded, it’s been accompanied by various forms of draconian digital restrictions – lock ins to proprietary file formats, actual encryption and obfuscation, and a general lack of consideration for the future. I wonder if in a hundred years, historians will look at this time and call our present time “The Hole” – the time between the end of print and the rise of open, interoperable and forward-looking technologies.
2. Speaking of forward-looking technologies, I started wondering about the state of my CDs burned in the early part of this decade; a few days later, Slashdot discussed the asked the same question. In my experience, a surprising number of them actually work okay even today. Unfortunately, the ones most prone to failure were the rewriteable ones – which means that if there were earlier versions of my HS thesis paper or my first-year college documents, they’re all gone. Not too much of a loss, but I’ve started wondering about the limits of storage – and I don’t mean megabytes, but the ability to back up that data. Just this year’s photos alone are 4.03GB – a not insubstantial amount of data to backup.
3. And my perennial backup question rises once again – even on Slashdot! Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good suggestions out of this year’s edition of “how do you backup your data” question. I think I may have to one day go get my parents a toaster and setup a peer-to-peer backup system – their data gets backed up here, my data gets backed up there. In the meantime, Jungle Disk to the rescue, though the question about reliability of the providers, the security of the providers and so on remain valid…
4. Google announced Chrome OS. And none of the details, leaving me slightly suspicious about the timing of the announcement and convinced that there’s a lot of work that needs to yet be done before the OS is ready to ship. The other question is why Google cares about the OS – after all, as long as their web browser (the bit that interacts most directly with their web services) runs on your choice of OS (be it Linux, BSD, Mac OS or Windows), then why should Google care to develop the rest of the software stack? I wonder if this is another ploy by Google, ala their 700MHz auction to foster innovative work in the field of OSes, rather than actually compete. (This guy, though, thinks that it’s the start of an all-out war.)
5. I’ve been using my Canon SX10 IS a lot (1777 photos since I’ve got the camera, though, admittedly, a number of them need to be deleted; see point one above). I’ve also had a chance to compare it to two other cameras that were close runner ups for my money – the Nikon Coolpix P90 and the Sony DSC-H20/B. I have to say, it would be a tough call – all of the cameras succeed and fail in their own ways. For example, the Nikon has the best optics – and the worst JPEG compression algorithm (and no support for RAW), giving weird ghosting artifacts. The Sony has an absurd lens – 38mm to 380mm – but an absolutely breathtaking digital zoom (by far and away the best I’ve ever seen on any device) and unbelievable low-light performance. My Canon is a good compromise between the two, but given the number of random failures I’ve seen of Canon cameras, the sudden whining noise the lens is making is beginning to scare me. A one month old camera should not be making this sort of high-pitched whining noise. Putting my ear to it also reveals some weird, Iomega click-of-death-like sounds, so I’m pretty scared. I also played with a couple of the newer DSLRs and came back very impressed, but realized that this means that those four year old cameras I drooled over are cheap and I should be able afford those now!
6. I also bought a wonderful telescope, cheaply since it came from Craigslist. Unfortunately, I’ve not been at home much, nor have the clouds parted to let me actually use the telescope. Sigh. However, I’ve discovered that a webcam I have fits perfectly into the telescope’s eyepiece, and the camera itself doesn’t heat up too much during use, giving me an inexpensive, and excellent astrophotography setup. Thus, with any luck and some time playing with the scope, I should have a decent chance at taking some pictures of planets. Maybe I’ll catch the next hit on Jupiter?
7. Related to the above: the Patriot Act strikes again! Some years ago, I had read a fascinating novella by one of The Big Three about an earth that was struck by a meteor shortly after genetic material for several humans was stored on the moon; after a cycle of several rebirths and failing to recolonize the planet, the last few humans were resurrected several million years after the calamity. For whatever reason, I didn’t write down the name of the book (nor the author), so I can’t find it. Since I had borrowed it from the Montgomery Public Library, I went to check if they could tell me what it was… only to find that in response to Title II of the Patriot Act, they purge the borrowing information for the libraries immediately and irretrievably so they can’t respond to a subpoena on what I’ve been reading. Sigh.
8. Speaking of reading, I made the jolly attempt to read Dune. After forcing myself through part I, I concluded that I had been erroneous in calling Virginia Woolf the most unreadable writer ever; Frank Herbert is by far and away more deserving of that “honour”. If this book is seriously considered one of the best science fiction novels of all time, I shudder to imagine what the worst might look like. I’ve returned to reading my beloved Alastair Reynolds (but not before making a short detour into old territory by Kim Stanley Robinson).

I think that’s it for this installment. I’ll see about doing one of these sorts of posts every couple of weeks if I don’t post more regularly. Or you could join the conversation at Twitter.

I got a great kick out of reading some of the comments to this Lifehacker.com article. Just a few days ago, I wondered what it would be like to not have Internet access 24/7 and while I admit to being slightly weirded out by the thought, I thought I could manage.

Then it occured to me that chances are that if my Internet access is down, it’s likely to be because of a weather issue or some local disaster. This is a problem because the Internet is my primary source of news: wandering around the house resulted in one TV (probably also useless since the same people provide Internet and cable) and one radio (slightly closer to the dead side of things than the live) being found and no other real way to get the news without the Internet.

The worst case scenario, of course, is a prolonged power outage, which happens more often than you’d think around here – the spring and autumn rains are pretty devastating when it comes to utilities. Then not only is the main Internet out, but all the devices with wireless connections are soon to follow as the batteries die out.

On Tuesday, one of my colleague’s apartment caught fire. While both her and her husband escaped unscathed, a number of their belongings did not. Which led me to reconsider a number of things, including my backup strategy.

One of the things that’s always bothered me about my backup strategy is that while it protects against stupidity (accidental deletion by me), malice (intentional deletion by malware) and failure (hardware crash), it doesn’t really offer any way to protect against catastrophe. Catastrophe, in this case, includes things like fire, flood, lightening strike or tornado, where I’m likely to survive, but I don’t have a chance to take my things with me, as well as those instances where I’m not likely to survive – say an attack on Washington, D.C. While I can’t do much about the latter case, I’ve been trying to figure out how to protect against a human-survivable catastrophes, like those in the first case.

Essentially there are only two things I need saved: my passport, and my data. Everything else is expendable. So my first instinct was to buy a safe and a hard drive to put into said safe. Therein lies a problem: putting a hard drive in and out requires manual intervention to actively save the data, and inevitably, catastrophe is likely to strike when the hard disk is sitting outside in the process of backing up. Plus, for years now I’ve considered non-redundant backups to be the height of heresy – my RAID 0 array is a collection of RAID 1 arrays, soon to be a RAID 0 array of RAID 5 arrays. (And that’s just the first line of defense.) So, next step is a simple RAID 1 array of the most important data – except, you can’t get RAID 1 hard drive casings any longer, and besides, you want simple, so that you can recover even if electronics are soaked, burnt or bashed.

So, by this time I’ve reached a toaster-like device (D-Link DNS-321 or similar) permanently connected, and located inside a fire proof box, with flat wires coming out through seal. The only problem is, running said cables – no matter how flat – will destroy the seal, making the fire-proof box not very fire-proof, and hence essentially useless. So then I thought about online backup services.

I have two major problems with online backup services: (a) the privacy of the data; and, (b) the survivability of the company. While the privacy of the data can be assured reasonably well (why hello, Truecrypt volume, how do you do), the survivability of the company becomes a major concern. So-called well-recommended firms like Box.net and Mozy have only been around for a few years (if not months) and without any idea of how they are performing financially, I’m loathe to let them act as my backup provider. Those companies with a track record which offer backup services, however – Amazon’s S3, for example, or Microsoft’s Live Drive – do not use standard protocols like SFTP, or heck, even WebDAV for transferring files; nor have Microsoft or Amazon ever had the slightest hesitation in killing off service offerings that were unprofitable for even a short time. Thus, even if the company holding my data survives, the service may not. (Though, one thing to consider: an added benefit of using an online provider is that it offers survivability against theft, which none of the other options do.)

So, I’m back where I’ve begun – how do I prevent data loss in the case of a catastrophe? One option I’m thinking about is setting up a toaster-like device at my folks’ place clear across on the other side of the globe. But that would require: (a) my parents leaving their connection on 24/7, which I know they are loathe to do; and (b) likely a trip to configure everything there. I don’t know what I’m going to do as yet – and I’m hoping to find out what all of you do. Any suggestions?