Personal

Adios Amazon S3 for home backups, too expensive

I've given up on it now. I'm deleting my buckets and switching to the following strategy.

A) Drobo which should give me fault tolerant storage of my media files. Primary copy is here

B) For now, an external 1Tb USB drive that I'm time maching to. This will work for maybe 6 months to a year.

I worked out the high speed internet package and S3 storage costs are about 30 a month for internet and 70 a month (for now) for storage. Thats 1200 a year and thats too much. I bought the Tb USB drive today for 130 bucks so thats a kilo buck in my pocket and I'll leave it in the office and bring home one day a week for time machine.

Amazon S3 for home backup a little expensive

I use jungledisk to backup my media stuff to S3. I currently have about 500Gb there but it's costing me 75 bucks a month now and it's only going to do up. Thats 500 a year at least. It'll cost as much as an iPhone contract soon as I use more.

This is too expensive I think so I'm rethinking the strategy and may end up buying a USB drive then I'll timemachine my Drobo too and then bring the drive to work or something. Of course, that only works as long as the Drobo stays < 1.5Tb. Which it won't for long. Maybe another Drobo is the answer at that point. S3 costs me a kilobuck a year right now once you add in the high speed internet I upgraded to for it. A Drobo would be cheaper.

Yamaha RXV-563, a week in

Very happy with this so far. For 300 bucks, it's pretty awesome. I use it in my living room with a DVD player and a Tivo attached to it. My Philips 32 inch LCD takes component video from the Yamaha and the Yamaha gets SVideo from the Tivo and component video from the DVD. Audio wise the Tivo is just RCA stereo and the DVD is digital co-ax. The Yamaha handles video and audio switching and has video up conversion for the Tivo to component video. The Tivo video signal is a little sharp though but acceptable.

I use virtual Cinema mode all the time as I don't have rear speakers attached. My wife doesnt want wires. It works ok in this mode. My main speakers are Definitive Tech BP10 speakers. The center is a KEF 100. I found setup pretty easy, the included MIC detects all the speakers and sets their range, distance and phase so it's pretty painless.

Much happier with this over the insignia unit, it's not even close.

Drobo 2nd Generation review, a month later.

Just finished my first month or so with a 2nd generation Drobo. It had a shaky start but it's been reliable since. I guess it's reliable until it's not and then it's sheer panic. What I've learned so far.

It's slow

It's much slower than a conventional USB drive. It appears around 3x slower on xbench and you get around 30MB/sec for an external FW800 drive with 4 SATA drives in it. If you need mega speed then this isn't for you.

Relayout takes a long time

Adding and removing drives requires a length rebuilding process which seems to take between 12 and 18 hours. This is annoying.

How I use it

I keep my iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries on it. They are usable but not super fast like this. Personally, I can live with it. I backup using Timemachine to the unit also. I backup my iMac which is the computer always connected to it using FW800. My MacBook I connect to it occasionaly using USB and time machine it to the Drobo also. You can't connect both at the same time so unplug the FW before plugging in USB.

Alternate backup strategy

You'd be nuts to rely on this as your sole backup. I store all my important data on it as well as time machine backups but I also use jungle disk to back everything up to Amazon S3 (internet storage) in case the unit itself fails. I upgraded to Charter Max for my internet to make this feasible (16MB down, 2Mbit up). I have about 450GB in backups for now. Jungle disk runs in the background and periodically pushes the changes for it's very convenient.

This is getting expensive now. I spent 900 bucks on my Drobo (475 + 3 x 130 for 3 1Tb drives). Amazon S3 costs about 40 bucks a month right now, the fast internet is maybe 30 bucks extra a month so thats 70 bucks a month in total. Thats 840 bucks a year. It's probably cheaper to buy another Drobo than do this but I'd need to keep the other Drobo in work or something. A conventional disk won't work for backups for long as I use HD camcorders which burn up disk space lately (8Gb/hour). That said, I probably could for now, just buy a 1.5Tb external backup drive but this is why I bought a Drobo in the first place. I hated having to buy a new drive every year and the drives seem to last about a year before they would fail (mostly WD external drives).

Interesting info

It seems that Drobo isn't so amazing technology wise. I've been reading that when it's under 50% full then it just uses mirroring and then it switches to RAID-5 when over 50%. I've heard when it uses a single drive (not recommended) then it mirrors sectors on the same drive. This may be why rebuilding takes so long. Restriping from 3 drives to 4 drives isn't cheap.

Am I happy or not

Thats a bigger question :) but for the Drobo, so far, yes. It works although this is the kind of thing where you're happy while it performs perfectly any issues results in zero satisfaction. Would I recommend it to my friends? So far, yes, with provisos on speed expectations etc. A good sign is that their forums are not very busy. There are a couple of complaints but in general people seem not to be complaining about issues there which is probably a healthy sign.

MacBook wake up network problems

I'm having trouble lately waking up my MacBook Pro. The wired network cable is dead when I do this. So far, I've been rebooting which fixes it. It looks like if I put it to sleep with the wired connection attached when it has no network when it wakes up. I have no issues with wireless access when I use it that way, it's just the wired ethernet which has the problem.

Swapped the Insignia RS-N2000 for a Yamaha RXV-564

Returned the insignia today because I couldn't program it with a universal remote control. I ended up buying a Yamaha RXV-564 which is a pretty big step up from the Insignia. It has video up conversion, 7.1 sound. The up conversion converts from SVideo to Component Video so HDMI is out when using that. I bought it as an open item at Best Buy, no remote control, for 275 bucks. No remote control is a big deal because you can't set it up without one. I ordered one just now from www.remote.com for 70 bucks so that's coming this week sometime.

Right now, I have my LCD TV attach to the monitor out component signals. The DVD is plugged in to it using component video and my Tivo is attached with s-video. Normal video from the Tivo won't upconvert. This is working well for now. I can control the volume and mute from the Tivo remote and I can switch video sources.

The up conversion from the Tivo is OK, I'd say, quality wise, there are artifacts, it isn't transparent but it's acceptable given the quality of Tivo output. Anything better wouldn't be acceptable.

I'll update some more when the remote arrives.

Jungledisk 2.5 finally does background backups

I just Amazon S3 for offsite backup at home for my media etc. I bought JungleDisk to push those files. I have around 300Gb of data right now that I autobackup with jungledisk to s3. I changed my internet speed to 16/2 and the 2Mbit upload makes a huge difference for this. It wasn't practical with a 512kbit speed, it just takes too long.

An issue with jungledisk was that it only ran in the foreground and the other members of my family regularly stopped it to use the iMac for their normal stuff. The new 2.5 version schedules backups so they run as system jobs and now they just happen everyday at 12am which simplifies everyones life.

Bought Insignia NS-R2000 stereo amplifier

and at 100 bucks you can't expect much but it's probably going back. The problem with it is that it doesn't work with universal remotes which is a major pain as I can't control the volume or mute without a second remote then.

I'll probably swap it for something around 350 that I saw. I'm using it to drive a pair of Definitive Technology BP10 loud speakers which I bought in 1995 and still sound great. They fill the room well, have a big sound and have a great bottom end down to 20Hz.

Dyson DC14 review

We just bought one of these to replace a smoking Hoover upright which we'd had for just about 8 years. It cost 399 at Lowes and we used a 20% off bed batch and beyond coupon to knock it down to 329. An extra 2 year warranty was 29 bucks which gives it a 7 year warranty.

Once we got it home, it's pretty impressive. It's very easy to move around, my 9 year old manages it with ease. It weighs 19lbs so it's not so hard to carry up or down a stairs. It doesn't use a bag and it's very easy to empty it into a bin, literally with a button push.

The cleaning action is pretty impressive. It pulled a LOT of fluff from the carpets on their first clean with the Dyson. About a half a can of it. The telescopic wand is pretty cool and makes cleaning high A/C vents pretty easy.

Overall, we're very pleased with it. We considered buying a DC19 also which was 550 bucks but couldn't see the point in spending the extra 150 dollars.