At the moment, I store my data in 3 places:
- Windows and programs run from a single 300GB hard drive (which I would like to upgrade to a solid state drive sometime soon).
- My user folder is dumped onto a RAID-1 array of 2x 1TB disks.
- Drobo containing 4x 1TB disk, formatted to give 3TB (or 2.7 TiB) space.
The Drobo is the current centre of question, I’m now up to 85% used which doesn’t give me much room for expansion. The question is what to do now.
My Drobo is currently piped through a DroboShare, which limits its performance greatly, I generally don’t get more than 12MB/s from it, even across a gigabit network. While this is not bad from a network device, it isn’t ideal. One way to fix this performance is to upgrade to an FS.
Upgrade options:
- Start upgrading the disks in the disk pack, if I swap in 2+ 2TB disks I will be able to expand the storage to meet my current needs for the not to immediate future.
This is a good choice as the future of storage is now uncertain, in the year that this method could bring, the storage market could have changed dramatically.
This would give me between 4-6TB (3.6-5.5TiB) space.
- Upgrade to a Drobo FS, if I pick up a FS and 2+x 2TB disks, I would be able to get all of my data onto those and my user drive. I could then in turn sell my older Drobo with the old disks as a full storage solution to make back some of the money I would loose in the upgrade.
This is a good choice as I would then have 3 bays to fill with 2tb disks as my storage use expands. A Drobo FS should achieve about 50MB/s transfer.
This would give me between 2-8TB (1.8-7.3TiB) space and 4x speed.
- Switch to another storage solution that would be much cheaper to buy initially but be harder to upgrade/swap disks in the future.
- Rely on short term measures to keep the data load on the Drobo down, such as shuffling data or archiving data on a cheap USB external disk.
Posted in Personal
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Tagged backup, Home, storage
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Like most people, when new things come out I am immediately attracted to them, in the IT community you can often push this a little further and grab at things before they are ‘new’. I first started using gmail and windows 7 when they were both early on in their beta and was impressed with what I found, the same might be said for wordpress 3, it seems to improve on 2.9, in much the same way 7 improved upon Vista. I’m also looking forward to trying out the new Ubuntu 10.04, which I would expect to be even more impressive.
While personally I’m not a strong believer of linux on the desktop environment, I prefer it on my server and in my devices, I just don’t find it as useful on the desktop. It will however be interesting to see how well it fairs at work, when I install it on a currently unused server.
I won’t however be upgrading my server from 8.04 quite yet, I did a little trial run on a copy and found it to break quite a few things in the upgrade. I will probably be waiting ’til Virtualmin GPL officially supports 10.04, and then use the import/export tool to move users over to a fresh 10.04 install.
I also finally got around to picking up a new computer chair, my old one was doing no favours to my back or posture. Office images following. Continue reading →
Today while reading articles hidden deep in Google reader when I should have been polishing my CV or doing something more productive, I came across the girl who cried webmaster. The difference with this story is ‘the danger came from real life and salvation came from the online world‘. I stumbled upon the link within a coding horror article, and was pleasantly surprised, I generally don’t bother to follow those sorts of anecdotal links.
Entering the fiction world for a few moments, one of my favourite authors passed away just a few days ago. David Eddings wrote some brilliant fiction, including my favourite trilogy ‘The Elenium’ (the following trilogy tagging along shortly after). The Elenium follows Sparhawk and Aphrael two of my favourite characters exploits in a interesting world where some gods take a bigger role in peoples lives.
No doubt by now anyone in further education has come across the latest version of Microsoft’s word processor. The new ribbon layout has managed to confuse students to the point of reverting to previous versions. It isn’t however a step back. The new ribbon (after a little practice and adjustment to thinking) is actually easier to use, although it requires you to relearn where all the tools and buttons are.
One of the nice features of the ribbon is the easy access to the citing tool. It allows you to add sources and add citations to text easily, and can even produce a nice little bibliography at the end for you, taking away much of the work needed balancing references.
One of the down sides to this update is that there is only so many formats included with word, and my university uses a style that isn’t included. I quickly found the folder where word stores it’s reference styles, and used a little Google-fu to find a nice little site. This site has a nice selection of extra styles which include quite a few Harvard referencing styles. Although one problem is that word doesn’t fully support all the features of this style and a little ‘hack’ is needed (running a tool over the document after its finished). Other styles have been achieved with just the xml.
For people with a bit more XML know-how they could try creating their own with one of the tools on the site above or just editing an existing style in [Program Files]/Microsoft Office/Office12/BibliographyStyle/
Posted in World
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Tagged University, Word
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If you’ve been paying attention in #kh (on swiftirc) or other channels you might share with me, you’re probably aware that for the most part of the year I live in student accommodation. While I’m living at university all of my belongings in the family home get put inside a cupboard in what was my old room. The room now is occupied by my brother, and as such when I return although most the time we arrange to have him sleep in the old bedroom, the fact it no longer is my room is something of a hindrance. There is a smaller box room where my brother used to sleep but its not big enough to accommodate a computer or even the belongings I bring back with me.
A few people I’ve discussed this with offered suggestions and a few didn’t believe what I said about the box room so I took a few images.
Another thing I mentioned lately was my ‘suitcase’ of books, and since the topic of books came up a bit lately I decided to find my copies of Artemis Fowl. Since I had the suitcase unpacked I thought I might as well snap a few images off at the same time. I’m chucking in a freebie of my desk in the other room.
Continue reading →
Posted in Personal
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Tagged Books, Home, Housing
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There is a post on lifehacker at the moment about different online backup services, and the leader in the polls seems to be mozy back. I’ve been using mozy back for a few years now, and for the most part there have been no problems what-so-ever. Having a look at the write ups on mozy and the lack of a mention on the referral codes seemed begging for me to leave a post.
Firstly why would anyone need to backup online? that should be the first question. There are a few reasons, first if you loose the data in the first place chances are something has gone badly wrong, that could include things like natural disasters, fires and theft. If the data is gone from your computer the hard copies you made on CD could also be gone. The next reason is someone similar, apart from being used as a backup, you can also access backed up data elsewhere. If you don’t have access to your computer for an extended period and need some data you can use the online service to download the data. Finally I’d say its easy. There is no burning CD’s or manually checking which files need backed up, the software will manage it for you.
The free version of mozy will let you backup up to 2gb of data (2.2 if you use a referral). The software scans your computer for files to backup, and using a quite simple interface you can select what you want using default file types and locations like “backup office documents”. You can also mark full folders/files/extensions to backup including future files. It is pretty much a setup and forget ordeal, might take half an hour, but you might never need to touch the software again.
I currently use it to back up two PC’s (under one account) and it does so with very little maintenance, a few times I’ve edited the rules to include/exclude files and folders but it was mainly out of choice.
Oh one final note, it uses an incremental backup system, it only backs up that which has changed since the last backup, so there’s no need to upload over a gb of data a couple of days a week, you instead will find it backing up odd mb when you’ve gone off and left your pc idle for a while.
If you want to get started I’d suggest visiting https://mozy.com/?ref… If you struggle to find the free sign up, at the time of writing it’s centre bottom of the page linked. There is no need to sign up for the larger account unless your a business or intend to use it to back up a decent chunk of data.
Posted in Web
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Tagged archive, backup, mozy, storage
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