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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.

The New York Times is carrying an article basically summarizing what most of us have known for a while – technology is slowly creeping into every waking moment of life. More importantly, as the pipes and tubes of the internet have become available to every single device out there, networks are creeping into every single waking moment of life, which is a far more powerful thing than just technology:

Courtesy XKCD.

For what it’s worth, Jan Chipchase said something to me a few years ago when we were talking about Nokia’s design philosophy that still sticks out in my mind; sadly, though, I think Nokia’s lost this philosophy sometime between when we talked and now. To wit:

We’ve reached the age where your phone is both the first thing you look at when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you look at when you go to sleep. And there’s a lot of use-cases in between. We have to design for each of those cases, and still keep the phone simple enough for the average human to use.

It definitely got me thinking about when I first got a phone the better part of a decade ago. Without needing to be told, I put the phone on the bedside table when I went to sleep, setting an alarm on it for the next day. It seemed like the correct thing to do – and now it’s reflex for me to set the alarm at night, tap the snooze button once in the morning and then get up to go get ready. I’m not alone either.

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 discovered I’d left a file I needed on my home Mac. Per usual, I went to VNC in and … what’s this? Oops, I left the Caps Lock key on – most likely, while moving the keyboard, I pressed down on it. I tried a few permutations to see if I could get it work regardless… no dice.

I really needed that file.

After a few seconds of thought, I logged into my router, activated port forwarding to allow me to log in to my Mac using SSH, and downloaded Putty.I successfully SSH’ed in. Once in, I FTP’ed the file to my NAS, and opened a copy of WinSCP to pull the file down. Total time spent? About 90 seconds.

Lots of ifs that worked my way: if I hadn’t left SSH running on my Mac, if I hadn’t setup my router to accept inbound connections, if I hadn’t had a NAS to transfer to, if I didn’t have WinSCP handy, then none of this worked. As it happened, all the ifs worked out in my favour. Lucky me. Otherwise, I’d have had to go back home and get that file. Or redo it. That would’ve taken ages.

One of the things that I’ve been debating about is what to do with older, perfectly serviceable, hardware. It’s a problem that’s become worse in recent days with the development of the Intel Atom, dual and quad core chips, but it’s not recent – this is a problem that’s followed me for a while, but of late it’s become a little ridiculous.

It started with a friend in college dropping off a 1.0GHz Pentium 3 box, saying that he couldn’t get it working, and had bought a new computer. As it was the middle of the exams in the fall quarter, I put it aside, and figured I’d get to it a little later, maybe after winter break. Opening the case after the break revealed that the machine was fine, but that dust had clogged up the fan, preventing it from spinning and causing the BIOS to refuse to turn on the computer. 15 minutes and a through brushing later, it was up and running and I called my friend – only to discover he’d graduated early and that he no longer wanted the computer back. “Cool. Free hardware!” I thought. I decided to put Windows Server 2003 on it and learn the basics ahead of a major transition to Server 2003 from NT 4 Server and Server 2000 machines at a city school I volunteered at. A year later, I installed an early version of Ubuntu (I think Hoary Hedgehog, but it may have even been Warty), and used it to become familiar with Linux. A year after that, I sold it at graduation for a $100, a princely sum for a machine that I acquired for free and was the better part of a decade old by then.

Two months after graduation, a friend came visiting me from New York, bearing gifts from another friend – an apparently dead AMD Athlon64, motherboard and an ATI Radeon 9800. Some amount of twiddling later I figured out that it was a bad capacitor on the motherboard, but I had neither the tools nor the soldering skills to replace the component. Instead, two years after I got it, I passed it on to a colleague at work who was studying for his CCNA, and told him how to repair it.

Of course, in the interim, I had acquired quite a collection of hardware from various sources; mixing and matching produced my current home server from spare parts, and a half-done photo-frame PC. Other parts have made my home network, allowed me to fix nearly a half-dozen laptops for friends and relatives and so on. But I still have a ridiculous number of parts from all sources, ranging from the useful-by-itself (a dual-core Athlon64 x2 HP Slimline with a bad 6150 that will become my and my flatmate’s DVR after the digital transition is done and we rid ourselves of cable) to the what-do-I-do-with-this (a Mini-ITX board with a soldered down ULV 600MHz Celeron that served as a firewall). I’ve tried selling a number of these things, but in this economy, no one’s buying, and those things that I’m willing to give away, people don’t see enough value in coming to pick up.

Most recently, two days ago, I resurrected my flatmate’s “obsolete” HP machine and made it a dedicated encoder machine – it sits and converts media from useless formats to useful ones. Sure, it’s slow, but I can’t help but feel bad about tossing a 5 year old, 2.0GHz AMD Athlon64, 400GB of hard drive space and a gigabyte of RAM. I’m still not sure what to do with the little Mini-ITX motherboard; any suggestions? What about a 1.6GHz Pentium 4M laptop? What about a 1.42GHz G4 Mac Mini? So far, I’ve thought of an Asterisk server (don’t really need it), a development box (for what?), and a bedside computer (though I have a netbook) respectively for each of those. Or maybe I should send the Mac Mini to Nevada, and give the laptop to my parents?

Via Slashdot, I came across this Network World article suggesting that it was time to stop building out wired network infrastructure and focus on building wireless networks instead. Some thoughts:

1. I am not at all surprised that the vast majority of consumers are perfectly happy with wireless networks. The fact is, that unless you are doing something that is extremely data-intensive, or live in a place with interference, wireless networks provide a perfectly acceptable network experience. Indeed, a short test a few weeks ago revealed that wireless portion of the D-Link DIR-655 that is the core of my home network isn’t even close to being saturated, despite my best efforts to cause sufficient congestion to slow things down. The fact is, like the Intel Atom is often sufficient for computing, 802.11g is often sufficient for networking.
2. In addition, wireless networking is a very convenient thing – so much easier than dragging a 10-30meter cord from your connection socket to the back of your computer. Since Ubuntu 6.06LTS “Dapper Drake”, Windows XP Service Pack 2, and Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”, came out, it’s become a lot easier to connect to wireless networks than it used to be – I remember struggling to get a Windows 2000 machine connected to wireless networks back in high school and remember rejoicing when I managed to get my Windows XP SP1 college laptop connected to wireless for the first time.
3. On the other hand, I find myself moving towards a more wired network. Things like my Xbox 360, which were quite contentedly running on wireless until recently, have been switched over to wired. While the statistics show that there was no measurable difference in latency between the wired and wireless connection, there seems to be a human perceivable change (>10ms) in the responsiveness of network-related operations, particularly things like logging into Xbox Live. I’m tempted to attribute this to better code in the wired section of the networking code.
4. Moreover, I’ve slowly become a little more paranoid about the security implications of wireless networks. While WEP had been cracked as far back as 2001, and WPA followed soon thereafter, attacks weren’t practicable until recently. Moore’s Law has made it possible to compute WEP and WPA keys in less than a minute.  That’s frightening. Thus, I’ve been on WPA2-PSK for a while now. While I would love to implement 802.1x authentication, I’ve come to realize that basically most of the home entertainment devices (certainly, the Xbox 360, for example) does not support 802.1x authentication – and there are no plans to bring it over to those devices. Thus WPA2-Enterprise is out of the question.

Thus given the options (possibly insecure wireless, secure wireless with many unsupported devices, secure wired), I’ve chosen the least effort option and started wiring the house. There’s still a ways to go until every device is connected via wires, but until someone finds a truly unbreakable wireless networking system, and it is universally supported, I’ll go the 19th century way with wires.

One of the pretty nifty new features of Ubuntu 9.04 is its global notification system. Just like Growl for Mac OS (and clone Snarl for Windows), this basically creates a single, unified, neat little notification system that shows up in one spot on the desktop. Not only does this cut down on clutter significantly (just take a look at the mess that is the Windows task tray notifications, if you don’t believe me), but it also makes the whole OS less intrusive, yet highly communicative.

It got me thinking, though, about a universal notification system – as in, for every computing thing in the world. That includes things like “Machine with MAC ID 00:11:22:33:44:55 (‘Varun-Nangias-Mac’) connected to the router” to “Updates available”. In fact, most of the messages (“New SMS on Blackberry”, “Printer on fire”, “New Yahoo! IM from Kats Gupta“, etc.) all fit in 140 characters. Sure you could have longer messages but for the most part, 140 characters is more than enough to communicate the jist of the message and to provide a no-nonsense summary of the event; if you really need more information, you should be able to take further action on by looking up a syslog, or the requisite application. And putting this information in an RSS feed or a Twitter-like stream on the Internet means that it’s easily accessible from almost any device with a web browser.

Given that Laconi.ca already exists and can be deployed to your own server, basically what is missing is software that links clients to the Laconica backend. Ubuntu and Mac OS already have most of that support – the notification systems can forward events that they receive. Windows support is sort of there in the form of Snarl (though very, very few applications use it). A J2ME application is needed for the vast majority of phones out there; an Android phone can have this sort of background daemon running all the time, anyway. Apple would likely need to build some sort of support into its push notification system in order for iPhones to mimic this functionality.

Put all of this together, and you’ve suddenly got a way to aggregate your digital life into a single, very easy, stream of information. Add the ability to respond to certain events via replies (ex.: “Updates available. Reply ‘install’ to install available updates”) and the cost of your remote management system has dropped to pretty much zero. How cool would that be?

About a year ago, my flatmate got herself one those nice little HP Slimline computers. For $340, it was a good deal, and with another $30 out of pocket, and twenty minutes of poking around inside, said computer was rocking twice the memory (with which Vista became usable) and a gigabit Ethernet card (which is sort of mandatory around this house). All in all, she was pleased with it and I was convinced it was a good deal.

Fast forward six months and the computer just sort of blue screens out of the blue for the first time. Convinced that it happened because of a faulty SD card or SD card reader, I toss the card, call it quits. Then it happens again. And again. And again. Which brings us to two weeks ago where the computer wouldn’t even start before blue screening (or, when running in Ubuntu, kernel panicking). All the more odd was that it was every conceivable sort of blue screen – ranging from IRQ errors, to initialization errors, to kernel errors, to the weirdest one of all: an Intel-only error (0x1000007F) that I’ve not seen since the early days of Win2K on a Pentium Pro. The kernel panics were equally weird – but mainly seemed to concern the bus.

I go through the usual culprits (bad RAM, bad PSU are my chief suspects) with no problems, and then out of nowhere it occurs to me that the computer has an Nvidia 6150. And since it was a compact-form factor, it in fact has a Nvidia mobile chip. For those of you lucky enough not to know what that means – basically, just about every NVidia mobile chip manufactured from mid-2007 onwards was not soldered properly and high heat would cause the solder to melt, and the chip to fail. Which, when I reflected on it, made perfect sense: the computer would be doing something computationally demanding, the fan would spin up, and eventually, it would get hot enough for something to affect the Nvidia chip – causing the utterly random blue screen.

Naturally, the motherboard (an Asus GL-6E “Acacia” board) is not covered by HP’s warranty extension for the dying 6150s; that’s only for another bunch of Asus boards. Thus, a little after a year, the computer is quite dead, which really offends me. Or as I put it to my flatmate, “He’s dead, Jim“. And given the weird design of this class of computer’s motherboard (halfway in between a Mini-ITX and a MicroATX), I can’t find an identical replacement* – meaning that the computer is already destined for the garbage heap.

And then they say that we’re getting better at making these things.

*: I can replace the board with a non-HP part – the Zotac GF8200-CE will accommodate (or so I believe) the 65W AMD Brisbane-core processor, the RAM and the hard drive without a fuss. But since Newegg has become really uptight about taking returns**, I can’t even take the $100 chance that I could buy this board and revive the computer.

**: In fact, I’ve basically stopped doing business with Newegg since they became a pain to give money to. Last purchase was in early 2007, and it was an extremely specialty part that couldn’t be gotten anywhere else (RAM for a printer). I fully believe that Newegg has jumped the shark.

So, usually I praise HP’s hardware (their software is a different matter) – it’s proved to be pretty durable and reliable despite my best efforts to ruin said hardware. I’ve really not had any significant trouble that HP warranty coverage hasn’t quite happily fixed or replaced. And indeed, this laptop has had a couple of issues over time, all covered by HP.

Some time ago, though, this laptop of mine developed one of those aggravating problems that’s never covered by warranty – the fan started to rattle. While I’m not an audiophile or one of those people that needs dead silence in order to work, once the fan started rattling like a thirty year old car, I knew it was time to replace it. This is not an easy task on this particular HP laptop – you essentially need to disassemble the entire laptop, right down to the case. However, given experience in replacing Apple iBook LCDs (now there is a pain) I felt up to the challenge and got to work by purchasing the replacement on eBay for $50 less than buying the part from HP directly. In fact, it went off very well – I turned off the computer around 10:04AM and it was back on by 11:17AM, according to the system’s log.

However, in doing so, I discovered one thing that seriously boggles the mind: the reason the fan started rattling in the first place was because the fan was dislocated from it’s usual spot. It was dislocated from said usual spot because usual spot was utterly clogged with dirtballs. Dirtballs that are stuck there because – get this – the air guide is a piece of plastic covered in glue stuck to the direct the air from the fan towards the CPU and the heatsink, as illustrated in a badly befitting cross-section diagram below:

Not only does the ball of crap eventually eat back into the fan so that the fan can’t spin properly (leading to the rattling fan issue), it also prevents badly needed cool air to go over the CPU and heatsink, both of which were a toasty 60C when I opened the computer this morning. I can’t even begin to count the ways that this situation could be avoided – starting with using glue only where necessary, as opposed to covering the entire air guide with glue. However, if HP seriously thinks this is good engineering, then I think it’s time I reconsidered buying HP – this engineering effort would have earned me a fail in fifth grade, and that was a long time ago in Mr. Montoya’s class.

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?