Geeking Out

[DeskJockey]

As 'er indoors is singularly unimpressed by my technical shenanigans, I thought I would share with you lot!

Ever since I read about Google irretrievably deleting people's accounts for (actual or suspected) violations of policy I've been feeling a bit concerned as we've got 20 years of digital pictures and videos stored on Google alongside documents and the like. The convenience factor is strong. While I don't think we're likely candidates to fall foul of policy, I wanted to mitigate the risk.

This took a bit of research as Google don't offer any easy methods for getting pictures out of the cloud. The "Google Takeout" option is a manual, rather bothersome process that doesn't offer any option of differentiation. It is everything everytime.

So, I found MultCloud. And after a bit of setup and tweakery, I now have the contents of our Google Photos library (all 112,000+ items) syncing to the NAS, alongside all the Google Drive contents using Synology CloudSync.

I then remembered that I've got a large amount of free storage on OneDrive, so set up a streaming transfer to that. So I've suddenly got three copies of all our pictures. That should do!

This then led me to think it was all getting a bit complicated to remember, so I used Yed (Visio alternative) to create a network diagram mapping out the various data flows and how to authenticate against devices and cloud services.

I enjoyed it!

[RobYob]

I'll pretend to know what that of that means and be suitably impressed.

I enjoyed Tom Scott's video yesterday about using ChatGPT to quickly produce code to organise his Gmail.

Thanks for the reminder to plug in my two portable HDDs and copy the last few months photos to them.

[DeskJockey]

Thank you. It helps!

[Beany]

Get a portable HDD of suitable capacity, and back up the Synology when it's done syncing.

Then put it somewhere dry and quiet, for just in case the Syno has a problem, or gets hacked by some hitherto unknown malware.

For the sake of 100 quid....

[DeskJockey]

I've got a spare pair of SSDs of the 256GB variety to do that with. Something for tomorrow.

[nuttinnew]

As 'er indoors is singularly unimpressed by my technical shenanigans, I thought I would share with you lot!

That's not what she meant when she told you to back up.
Google scenario sounds a pita, good job retrieving & copying your stuff (I don't know anything to appreciate the technical side though ).

[KiwiDave]

Excellent work.

I'm a long way into doing this to about 9TB of photos currently. It's quite therapeutic to sort it all out.

[Jobbo]

I enjoyed Tom Scott's video yesterday about using ChatGPT to quickly produce code to organise his Gmail.

I enjoyed that, but then I saw this about Bing’s AI yesterday:


Since I also have a lot of OneDrive storage I have set my iPhone to upload all photos to OneDrive automatically; that means I have an original on my phone, backed up to my Mac Mini - itself backed up to Time Machine on a Synology NAS and the OneDrive cloud-stored copy; all without actually doing anything other than checking it’s working every few months. I’m also fairly well protected if I lose my phone because saving to OneDrive is done all the time using mobile data if required, not just when I’m on the home network.

That’s just photos taken on my phone, admittedly, but that’s all I’ve used for years.

[Beany]

Seeing as this seems to to be as close as we have to a NAS thread, I've just taken a brave pill and ordered this:

https://www.ebuyer.com/1615568-synology ... nas-ds723-

The DS214+ is nearing a decade old and is out of mainline support (IE it won't go past DSM 7.1 - 7.2 is out now, I'll get nothing more than security updates now) so I'll throw my disks in there for now, then next month I'll get some new disks to migrate to, because that way it won't feel like I'm spending £700 at once, oof.

Four hundred and seventy quid at once is bad enough, even if I am telling myself that if it lasts 10 years again, it's under fifty quid a year, it's under fifrty quid a year, etc.

Another reason to update it is that I now have >300mb upload speeds on my internet, but the NAS - when using secure connections - maxes out about 150mb/sec (it'll hit disk speeds on unsecure connections, but they're now an annoyance to set up, and not remotely suitable over the internet). I've repeatedly verified this with (careful use of) secure and insecure connectivity methods over the internet and it's definitely a limitation of the NAS.

Having an internet connection that's faster than how I use the NAS in the real world is...well it's a problem I didn't think I'd have to deal with any time soon

[DeskJockey]

I've been pondering replacing my DS212+ for some of the same reasons. But I'm also wondering about getting a thin client PC to run a couple of VMs on, thus making the NAS less critical.

Edit: Multcloud doesn't seem to be quite as good as initially thought, I'll need to devote some time to during it out.

BTW are you aware of the requirement for Synology branded disks? I read something about people getting (rightly) annoyed about it.

[Beany]

It's only a requirement on the higher end stuff like the stuff directed expressly at the enterprise market - almost all of the non-XS-class DS stuff is still fine.

It's part of Synology's plan to eat into the corporate SAN/NAS market, and they can't do that without vertically integrated solutions that are supported from the network cable right down to RAM modules and disk firmware - like something you'd get from NetApp, and if you used a non-NetApp disk in one of their arrays, they'd not let you use that either.

For the consumer gear (With a few exceptions like the 12 bay stuff - which is on the edge of being 'consumer' anyway) it's business as usual, effectively.

I'll just get some disks that are on the compatability list at a decent price and not worry about it. It's very much a mountain/molehill thing, and most of the 'anger' has been stoked up by people who have never touched enterprise gear before - and by reviewers who have worked with enterprise gear, and frankly, should know fucking better but who want the anger-clicks.

[DeskJockey]

That sounds reasonable. I didn't go into too much detail as I'm not in the market for a new one. Good to know.

[Beany]

Sigh..

We are sorry to inform you that the above item(s) are currently out of stock and are not available for dispatch.

Unfortunately we were unaware of this stock discrepancy until your order was passed to our warehouse for dispatch.

I specifically ordered from eBuyer because they had next day delivery....

Oh well, unless they can get stock in within the next few days I guess it's cancel, and order from somewhere that has a working stock management system

[KiwiDave]

What are our thoughts about buying a WD Red disc that isn't on the compatibility list for a 4-bay NAS?

One of my discs has just retired itself and the two WD Red models Synology list as compatible have different model numbers to what I can buy here?

They list WD60EFRX - 68L0BN and WD60EFRX - 68MYMN1 as compatible but I can only source WD60EFPX here easily. As my NAS enclosure is pretty old I'm thinking maybe it's just a newer version of the same disc?

[Matty]

They fucked the compatibility list a while back...just check others have used them and are working, but you'll be fine.

Just make sure the drives aren't SMR.