The year started with a quick install of an Acer Aspire Windows Home Server. That was a straight-forward install and the server moved on to a new home. As far as I know it’s doing well. It was fun to revisit WHS v1 again. It did make me appreciate WHS 2011, even without drive extender, it just looks and feels much more modern.

Then I took a look at my Synology 212j. I bought it over the holiday but only recently got a chance to look at it. I’ve spent most of my time looking at it’s storage capabilities rather than the applications. Considering the number of drive rebuilds and factory resets it didn’t make much sense to put data or apps on it. The DS212j is at the low end of their two-bay product line so I don’t expect turbo performance. Having said that, the performance has been solid. I suspect it would suffer if I start enabling a lot of those apps but that remains to be seen. I’m impressed by it’s list of features and I’m seriously considering pulling the trigger one of their larger units to handle some of my file storage needs.

Cloudberry Backup For Windows Home Server 2011 Issue

Cloudberry for WHS 2011 has given me some issues. The database file on the C: drive has grown to over 25GB in size so I was getting low disk warnings for drive C:. A visit to the Cloudberry forums showed I wasn’t alone, but there wasn’t a solution. So I opened a support ticket. I got a response the next day that there was a new version posted which included the ability to move the database file.  I had updated to the then latest version before opening the ticket so I was a day early. The release notes didn’t make any mention of moving the database so here are the instructions Cloudberry support gave me:

I’d like to inform that we have published a new version (v2.6.2) where you can move the repository file to another location. You can download from our website (www.cloudberrylab.com).

Note: If you are using WHS-family add-in, the upgrade is not supported on WHS servers, you have to uninstall the add-on before installing a new version.

Then follow these steps:

1) Run command line by going to Start | Run: cmd.exe.
2) Make sure you change your current folder to CloudBerry Backup product installation:
cd C:\Program Files\CloudBerryLab\CloudBerry Online Backup
3) To move the repository file (CBBackup.db), run the following command:
cbb.exe option -databaseLocation path
(where “path” is a new repository file destination)

As a result, the CBBackup.db file will be moved to the new location.
Note: Make sure the CloudBerry Backup is not open and there are no running backup plans before moving.

I ended up deleting the database file and recreating my backup plans. To me the size of the file was a problem, so moving it wasn’t a good solution, it would just avoid the low disk problem. The seems to have gone well and my Cloudberry database file is a more realistic 2 GB so far. I’ll have to see how large this one grows over time and I’ll move it if necessary.

I was also interested to see the comment about WHS not supporting an upgrade and requiring an uninstall/re-install. I learned that the hard way and now routinely do an uninstall/re-install but this is the first time I’ve seen it mentioned by Cloudberry. Guess I don’t look in the right places.

A Short February

February’s a short month and I don’t have any firm plans. I’ll keep looking at the Synology apps and I’m looking to get a NAS or server up and running to handle some storage requirements I have. I plan to use some existing hard drives rather than buying new drives at today’s prices. I last bought a drive back in June and paid $120 for a 3 TB Hitachi drive. Today, even with prices heading back down a bit, that same drive is $230.  So right now Synology is topping my list as my storage choice.

Not much to cover this time around, so I’ll wrap it up here and get back to watching some football.

This was configured using the Synology DiskStation 4 beta software although the DiskStation 3 software is set up the same way based on the information at the Synology website.

iSCSI Target Types

The Synology DiskStation software supports three different configuration types as an iSCSI LUN:

Regular Files – this configures the target on an already created file volume. This allows flexibility in allocating space. It can be increased anytime, as long as there’s space available on the volume.

Block Level (Single LUN on RAID) – this configures the target on available disks. There can’t be anything else on the disks used and they will be completely allocated. This provides the best performance (according to Synology). The disks can be configured for RAID.

Block Level (Multiple LUNs on RAID) – this configures the target on available disk space. Space already allocated to volumes can’t be used, but the disk(s) can be shared with file volumes.

Configuring iSCSI

The Synology website has good instructions on configuring iSCSI with their software so I won’t repeat it here. But for my simple requirements I was able to run through the wizard and accept the defaults. I didn’t set up any advanced options. When configuring a “Regular Files” LUN the size defaults to 1 GB so I did increase that to a more useful size.

Configuring iSCSI on Windows Home Server 2011 was a bit different than documented by Synology so I’ll run through it here. The configuration is the same for Windows 7 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. I suspect Windows Server 2008 R2 is also the same along with the other related software such as Small Business Server 2008.

This needs to be done on the server itself so a Remote Desktop connection is needed (assuming the server is headless). Go to Control Panel and select “Set up iSCSI Initiator”. Then answer “Yes” to the prompt to start the iSCSI service.

The iSCSI properties dialog will appera – select discovery tab then click the “Discover Portal” button and enter the IP address (or DNS name) of the Synology NAS. Once the info is entered you should see the iSCSI target on the Synology NAS although it will still be listed as inactive. To establish the connection click the “Connect” button. In a strange twist of terminology you want to leave the default “Add this connection to the list of Favorite Targets” in order to make the connection persistent.

At this point the connection is established and the status will change to “Connected”. Once the connection is established you’ll need to switch over the “Disk Management” section of the Computer Management console.

When you click on “Disk Management” you’ll be prompted to initialize the disk. If the disk will be larger than 2 TB select “GPT” as the partition table type. Right-click on the newly added disk and select “New Simple Volume” from the context menu. Run through the wizard and when the wizard is done, so are you.

Now the disk can be used like any other local disk.

Benchmarks

Performance isn’t a reason for doing iSCSI, at least not with a home network and a low-end Synology DS212j. It’s going to be slower than a local SATA drive, but since I can, I did some benchmarks.

This is Windows Home Server 2011 running on an HP MicroServer with relatively slow Western Digital 1TB Green Drives. It’s a Gigabit network using the MicroServer’s onboard NIC. When running the benchmarks I kept network traffic to a minimum, no streaming video or file copies, but I didn’t turn any devices off, so there was the normal background network traffic. Everything is connected to the same switch.

The DS212j had two 7200 RPM drives in it. One a Western Digital Caviar Black and the other a Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 drive. Both are on Synology’s compatibility list.

The first benchmarks show the local drives, the second shows a “Regular Files” iSCSI target.

I also set up each type of Block Level LUN and benchmarked them. The first is the Single LUN setup which should be the best performer, the second is a Multi LUN setup.

Wrapping Up

Being able to use the Synology boxes as an iSCSI target is a nice feature. Since it’s accessed over the network it’s not going to out perform a local drive unless you got a data-center class network to run it over. iSCSI doesn’t allow multiple PCs to access the same LUN (except with cluster aware software) since there’s no file locking, so it’s not a suitable replacement for a file share.

The more I explore the Synology software the more I’m considering one of their larger models. While I don’t see any immediate need to swap out anything I use for an iSCSI connected Synology NAS, I do think that an investment in a Synology DiskStation would eventually be used as an iSCSI connected drive somewhere in the future.

Additional Links:

Wikipedia article about iSCSI

Synology iSCSI Best Paractices

Synology iSCSI – How to Use

I’m running Synology DiskStation Manager 4 beta (DSM4) on the Synology DS212j. There isn’t a new Data Replicator software version for the DSM 4 beta so I’m using the version that was on the DSM 3 DVD that shipped with my NAS. I also checked the Synology website and it’s the latest version. For testing I have my Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) PC and a Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) virtual machine.

The software installation is straight-forward and uncomplicated so I won’t post screenshots. The only issue I had was that the DVD menu (spawned by autorun) didn’t have the privileges necessary to run the install and rather than generate a error or other message it just ignored the click. Running the install directly presented the expected UAC prompt and all was well. The software is in the \Window\Data Replicator 3 directory on the DVD.

When I started DR3 the first time I was prompted by the Windows 7 prompt to let Data Replicator 4 through the Windows firewall. Between this pop-up and the program itself there was a jumble of dialog boxes, one of which that said DR3 would have a problem because opening up the firewall failed. I cleared that warning and dug through the windows to find the firewall prompt and OK’d it. Everything ran fine after that.

The main program screen is shown below (click for full size):

Clicking the “Select” button runs through a series of dialog boxes to select the target Synology server and then the shared folder on that server. I selected my home folder on the server although you can choose any share the ID has access to.

Once the folder is selected I’d suggest going into options before doing any backup. The options are shown below:

The screenshot shows the default options. I decided to enable 3 file versions and 30 restore points. I also enabled deleting the backed up files when the local file is deleted.

The restore point option is similar to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a point in time that has a copy of all backup files as they existed at that time. According to the docs these are not unique copies in each restore point, only one copy of each file is kept. This linking is well hidden but appears to be true. File properties through both Windows and Synology’s own File Station software show unique files and in fact show size totals for the backup directory tree as if they were unique files. But when disk space used is viewed through Storage Manager it’s obvious there’s only one copy per file. File Stations and Windows show over 27 GB of files in my backup folder but there’s less than 10 GB of space used on the entire disk (and that 10 GB is more than the backups).

File Structure On Synology NAS

Each PC and user combination gets a unique directory name that contains the backups for that user/PC combination. For example, my two PCs are:

The backups, snapshots and versions are in sub-directories of those directories.

Backups

The first screenshot at the top shows the main screen where the files to be backed up can be selected. It’s pretty standard file selection stuff. Even though some mail can be backed up, it’s mail that resides in files on the PC. I didn’t test any mail backup since I don’t use the supported apps.

Backups can be done three ways:

Immediate – the backup runs when you click the button

Sync – the files will be monitored and any changes will be replicated. You’ll be prompted to do a immediate incremental backup when you select sync. This is to catch and changes when files weren’t being monitored.

Schedule – Like the name says. Schedule a daily, weekly or monthly backup

Restores

Restores are wizard based and can be done by restore point. Any in progress backups, including sync monitoring, must be stopped before doing a restore. You can also simply browse the backed up files and pull out the one you want.

Using DR3 and Impressions

Data Replicator 3 isn’t the slickest interface out there, nor the quickest, nor feature rich. But as a file based backup program it’s not bad. The strongest features are the immediate syn and file versions.

DR3 does have some annoyances. Assuming syncing is enabled and set to start when windows boots, there will be a prompt to do a backup and then the backup progress will be on screen and can’t be closed until the backup is done. Turning off the consistency check avoids this, but at the risk of missing changes unless there’s a manual or scheduled backup done. This consistency check can take awhile for what seems like little data.

Cancelling an in progress backup causes the next backup to do a cleanup as it removes a temporary folder. This also takes awhile.

The restore points only seem to occur for the incremental backup. My DR3 restore points are all when I restarted DR3. Maybe when I run it longer and leave it undisturbed it will create a restore point. But I doubt it and it it does it’s undocumented.

The default backup selections cover the standard location for data files. If you save data in non-standard locations you’ll have to manually select them. The same if you want to back up programs. There’s no concept of file sets – such as a files of a certain type anywhere on the disk.

I save data on my Windows Home Server and have very little on my PC, so I have little need for the sync and version features. My existing Windows Home Server backup provides a bare metal restore along with file versions so I’ll stick with that even though it limited to once a day (or manual backups).

Considering Synology isn’t in the business of making backup software I expected the typical bundled software half-effort so a feature check box could be ticked. Instead I found Synology’s Data Replicator 3 to be a good (not great) software package that can do the job of protecting data files.

Apple’s Time Machine will continue to fill up a disk as long as there’s data to be backed up and space to put it. Only when it runs out of space will it delete the oldest backups. While it is optional, my first step was for me to create two volumes on the DS212j. One for Time Machine and one for everything else. Dedicating a disk volume to Time Machine is not required, but I wanted a way to limit the space used by Time Machine. Because it made more sense in my mind I used Volume 1 for everything except Time Machine and dedicated Volume 2 to a Time Machine share. Since I was setting up a new NAS I simply started fresh with two volumes. A user’s disk usage across an entire volume can also be limited using a quota, which would include Time Machine usage so this would be another way to go, but it wasn’t my choice. The screenshot below shoes my volume configuration (click for full size).

I probably would have been better off starting with a smaller volume, leave some free space, and expand if I needed the space. This is because shrinking the volumes isn’t possible and I may not need all that space for Time Machine. But I can also put other files on that volumes. Plus, I suspect I’ll be rebuilding this test box a few times,

Once I have a place for the the Time Machine share it’s time to create it. This is done through the “Shared Folder” selection in Control Panel.

Then just fill in the information for the share. You can call the share anything you want and the description is optional.

Encryption and hiding the share are optional and I don’t use them myself. While Time Machine can encrypt local backups it won’t encrypt network backups so you may want to use this encryption. Click OK to create the share. Then select the new share and click the “Privileges Setup” button.

Select the user(s) you want to have access to the Time Machine share. You can use the admin account if that’s what you want. But I create an ID for each person accessing the Synology NAS. The same ID can be used from multiple PCs

Now it’s just a matter of going to the Macs and selecting the share as the destination. It will automatically appear as a possible destination, just select it and go.

I’ve been running Time Machine backups from  to Macs, both running the latest version of OS X Lion.

Optionally setup a user in Google Apps to use for sending emails. I have a dedicated account for sending these sort of system emails. You can use any account. You’ll need the email address and password.

Open the Synology DiskStation Manager, go to Control Panel (in DSM, not your PC), open “Notifications” and select the “E-mail” tab. The screen, with sample values, is shown below(Double-click for full size).

1. This is the SMTP server and port and is the same for both GMail and Google Apps Email. The server is smtp.gmail.com and the port is 587. Some users may find port 25 should be used although I’ve found 537 always works.
2. The username and password is the logon information for you Google email account and can be GMail or a Google Apps account.
3. The third section configures where the notification are sent. Two addresses can be specified. Since I use this email account for notifications on multiple computers I specify Synology 212j as the subject prefix so I know which computer sent the email. Using the same email as your logon as the primary email is often recommended but I haven’t had any issues using a different destination email in any situation.
4. Click the “Send a test email” to make sure everything is working.

If you’re on DMS 4 you can click the Advanced tab to select which notification emails get sent. By default, every possible notification will go through email.

Disk Configuration

The DS212j is sold diskless and can handle two internal SATA drives and has two USB ports for external devices. I used two Western Digital WD10EACS 1TB drives which are on Synology’s compatibility list. I had wanted to try two different sized hard drives in order to try out Synology’s Hybrid RAID (SHR) but the spare 3 TB drive I have isn’t on their compatibility list so the SHR test will have to wait until I free up a 2 TB drive or I’m familiar enough the the DiskStation to know if a problem might be HDD compatibility. For now I’ll stick with approved drives.  Synology Hybrid RAID is a Drobo like technology that provides data-redundancy using  different sized drives. The DS212j can also be configured using RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD. I configured the DS212j to use SHR even though the drives were the same. I plan to pop in a larger disk once I free one up and see how Synology handles this.

The default installation configured one drive volume, using both drives, with SHR. I decided I wanted to test the DiskStation as a Time Machine destination so I reconfigured drives to be two volumes. The first is 332 GB and will be my working volume for everything except Time Machine. The second will be 600 GB and dedicated as a Time Machine destination. (A 1 TB drive has only 932 GB once formatted and SHR effectively mirrors the two drives.) After creating the Time Machine volume I created a share on it which I then dedicated to Time Machine. The Time Machine share can’t be used for anything else and only one Time Machine share can be created. The Time Machine share can be used by multiple Macs (I’m currently testing with two).

DiskStation Manager 4 Beta

Synology just released the beta for their next DSM version, DSM 4 Beta. Since this is my first Synology box I set up the drives and tested Time Machine and a couple shares using the DSM 3.2 software. I mainly wanted to be sure everything was working before I installed the beta, but once I was comfortable my DS212j was healthy I upgraded to DSM 4 Beta. Downgrading to 3.2 isn’t possible but since this was a new box there wasn’t any risk for me. A search of the Synology forums showed Synology betas are usually pretty stable, and while there were issues mentioned in the forums, none seemed like they would brick my box. So my work since then has been with the DSM 4 beta (DSM 4.0-2166).

First Impressions

I’ve yet to dive deep into anything besides the Time Machine backups but my overall impression of the Synology software and hardware is overwhelmingly positive.  The hardware seems solidly built. Plus, I like manufacturers that do the little things like include extra screws. The DS212j needs 8 hard drive screws, they provide 10. It needs two screws for the case they provide three. While the case is plastic, it is solidly put together. The fan is quiet so no complaints there.

I like the cross platform support. At least on paper, Windows, Mac and Linux clients get almost equal billing, The DSM 4 Beta cloud client is Windows only at the time but Mac support is promised by the final release. Of course, the pessimist in me is skeptical of the promise until I try it. I actually did the install and configuration from my Mac which is promising, The Data Redirector (for backing up PCs) doesn’t have a Linux or Mac version  A case could be made that Time Machine support negates the need for the Data Redirector and rsynch could be used for Linux. The Download Director doesn’t have a Linux version or a version for OS X after 10.6 so this does appear to be the single cross-platform gap.

I haven’t done any real benchmarking, plus the WD drives in the box are not built for speed. Still, file copies between my Windows 7 desktop and the Synology box are about 30% slower than copies to my HP MicroServer running Windows Home Server 2011. This was with the DSM 4 Beta Firmware which may have affected performance. But at this point, speed isn’t a selling point.

Time Machine backups and restores are working fine with the DS212j as the backup destination. I’ve never been a fan of Time Machine over the network. Time Machine backups have always seemed rather brittle to me and backing up over the network seemed to add one more complication. But having said that, it’s been fine for the first day.

DSM 4 doesn’t start the standard packages like DSM 3.2 does. At the time I upgraded I wasn’t using any of them so the previous standard applications needed to be started. Packages include two audio servers – iTunes server and Audio Station. Media Server is a DLNA server and Photo Station is for sharing photos. Download Station allows downloading files such as torrent files. Surveillance Station allows control of wireless cameras.  There’s also a selection of 12 add-on packages that include WordPress, Email Server, and Cloud Station among others.

It wasn’t obvious from the description, but the forums indicate that the “Backup and Restore” package in DSM can backup to Amazon S3 so that could be the backup solution for my critical files. I’ll take a look to see how it compares to Cloudberry on my Windows Home Server and see if it has the features I want.

I look forward to trying out the various applications and seeing where the Synology DS212j fits in my home data center.  I‘m a little afraid I’ll really like it and have to buy a larger model to get the disk space I’d need. Despite being called a NAS, my first impression is that the Synology DiskStations are a viable contender as a home server.

If not, and you want to learn more, here are some links with more information.

• A little old, but the Verge has a relatively short but informative article about SOPA. The DNS provisions appear dead (for now, but the rest still applies). Although those DNS provisions are still in the bill posted on the Library of Congress’ Thomas site.
• The Reddit blog has a good breakdown of breakdown of the SOPA and PIPA provisions
• Wikipedia has a long write-up about SOPA and does a good job of advocating the reasons SOPA is bad law. Just don’t expect to be able to read this the 18th.

Rumor has it that the Google homepage will have SOPA related links on the 18th.

Even if SOPA and PIPA fail to pass this year I have no doubt they will return with a new name so just because the latest news makes it appear they are dead, it’s not a permanent condition.

Being a Mac program it’s not unusual that the inner workings are hidden from the user. But moving the file is pretty simple.

Move to a New Mac

The operative word here is “move” which means we don’t need Bento on the old computer.

Pre-Move Checklist:

1. Install Bento on the new computer. Make sure it’s the exact same version as the original computer. From the menu you can select bento –> About Bento to get the version.
2. Be sure that Bento on the new computer doesn’t have any data. We’ll do a backup but the data won’t be merged.

The Move:

By default Bento saves the database to [UserHome]/Library/Application Support/Bento where [UserHome] is your home directory. This is also shown as ~/Library where the tilde indicates the home directory.

OS X Lion hides the library folder by default. To open the folder on Lion start Finder and hold the “Option” key while selecting the “Go” menu. The ~/Library folder will be opened. Macworld  has 18 other ways of opening the Library so you can pick your favorite.

1. On the new computer browse to ~/Library/Application Support/Bento in Finder and rename bento.bentodb to bento.bentodb.backup.
2. Copy ~/Library/Application Support/Bento/bento.bentodb from the old computer to ~/Library/Application Support/Bentoon the new computer.You can do this any way your comfortable with such as connecting over the network or using a USB drive and sneaker net.
3. Start Bento on the new computer. You’re done.

The bento.bentodb file is actually a OS X package file which is actually a collection of files with the right attributes so OS X presents it to us as a single file unless we select “open package contents”. If you use a Windows file system in a interim step the file will appear as a directory. Be sure to copy the entire directory and do not change any contents.

Bonus Tip – Open A Different Bento Database

You can run multiple copies of Bento or share the same Bento database from multiple computers. I save my Bento database on Windows Home Server and access the same file from all my PCs. Actually I also have multiple databases on the Windows Home Server. One word of warning – Bento is not a multi-user database so be careful not to open the file from two PCs at the same time.

Start Bento while holding down the option key. The following dialog will appear and you can select the database you want to open. I select the “Show this dialog” option so I don’t have to hold the option key and the dialog always appears.

Select database you want to open and any other options you want.

Syncing Bento

I no longer sync Bento but at one time I did use Dropbox to Sync Bento Databases between Macs.

The libraries are a directory structure that OS X understands and may present to the user as a single file. For example, iPhoto displays as a single file in OS X unless “show package contents” is selected. Even though my iPhoto library is on a WHS share OS X displays it to me as a single file bundle. As long as the files remain within the library structure all is well. Libraries that maintain their own internal trash bin (i.e. iPhoto and Aperture, maybe more) end up trying to move the files to the OS X trash bin when you empty the library’s trash bin.

I recently noticed that when I emptied the trash in iPhoto that it moved the files to a “.Trashes” folder on my WHS share. (Note the leading dot)  See the first graphic to see what I mean, click it to enlarge) Well actually I noticed this huge .Trashes folder and then found it came from iPhoto and Aperture. If this was an OS X drive running on OS X it would be part of the trash bin and get emptied when I emptied the trash. Aperture also worked the same way once I checked. On the WHS share they live forever,  even OS X didn’t see it as part of the recycle bin.

The .Trashes folder could be deleted just like any other folder without causing a problem. The next time you empty a library’s trash it will be recreated. To see the folder you need to enable viewing hidden files and folder (click for full size for the Windows 7 setting below):

I also found that iTunes saved replaced apps to the .Trashes folder. Luckily it doesn’t save replaced or deleted podcasts. If it did I’d probably have run out of disk space. iTunes doesn’t seem to save anything I delete on my own, only the apps it replaced.

It’s only my apps that maintain their own library structure that have this issue. Deleting regular files on my WHS from OS X deletes them immediately.

I guess there is a price to pay for trying to get Microsoft and Apple to play together. But this is a small prices since it’s easily fixed with a scheduled task to delete the directory.

Windows Home Server v1 will end-of-life in January 2013 so any WHS v1 purchase needs to take that into account. It’s not like the server will turn into a pumpkin at that time, but Microsoft will stop providing updates. This will be after the Windows 8 release date so hopefully Microsoft would release new connector software if it’s needed for WHS. If you’re going to be using the server for remote access, meaning it’s accessible from the internet, the lack of security updates after 2012 would be a concern. If the server is going to only be accessed by computers in the home then it’s less of a concern.

The hardware should support Windows Home Server 2011 if you want to install it later. There’s no onboard video so you’ll either need to install a PCIe x1 video card or do a blind unattended install. The server comes with 2GB of RAM and the specs say that 2GB is the max so that could be an issue depending on what add-ins you install. The Atom D510 CPU is 64-bit so can run WHS 2011.

This server was purchased to provide backup and central storage for a few PCs, basically a low cost NAS. There’s only one drive so to use folder duplication a second drive would have to be added. Because hard drive prices haven’t returned to pre-flood pricing I’m contributing one of my slightly used 2 TB drives for use in the server.

Initial Setup

Because the WHS software delivered with the server is quit old I couldn’t use if for setup since I have Windows 7 clients. If I had Vista or XP clients I could have installed the bundled software and then upgraded. Since I only had Windows 7 I followed these steps:

1. Unpacked, plugged in and powered on the server. While it was doing its initial setup I went to step 2.
2. Download the latest connector software from Microsoft and burn it to a CD.
3. Once the LEDs stopped blinking I was ready to move on. The quick start light said all the blue LEDs would be on solid which is a bit confusing. The panel LEDs include a network LED which blinks for network activity and a hard drive light which blinks for activity. The status LED was blue and red while the drive lights were blue and purple. I moved on once things seemed to settle down.
4. I popped the connector CD into a Windows 7 PC and ran it. The screenshots for the installation are below. Click for a larger picture.
      
     
      
      
5. After logging onto the Windows Home Server my next step was to remove the McAfee Anti-virus software. I don’t use AV on my own WHS and if the owner wanted AV McAfee would be my last choice. As it is the included license is limited to 60-days so removing it wasn’t a problem for the server owner. The version pre-installed won’t work once WHS is updated although there might be an update from McAfee (I didn’t bother to inquire).I uninstalled McAfee through Add-Remove programs after RDP’ing into the server. It can’t be removed through the add-in manager.
6. While still RDP’d into the server I ran Windows update and installed all the available updates.

At this point the Acer Aspire is a basic Windows Home Server v1 box with the latest updates.

Hardware & Features

The server comes with one 2TB Western Digital Green Drive (WD20EADS). I’d prefer a small system drive since I don’t like to share the OS drive with data, In this case it’s not much of a concern since I don’t expect heavy usage. So to take advantage of folder duplication I’ll be adding a second drive which is also a W20EADS drive. For testing purposes I added two more drives.

The server also has a nice compact form factor and will look good on a shelf. There’s also an eSata port and several USB ports (all USB 2). The front USB port has a one-button copy feature I’ll talk about later.

It’s also surprisingly quiet. I’ve got four drives installed and I’m doing a file copy. Even sitting next to the server I have to strain to hear the fan and the drives are silent.

There’s some multimedia software that will probably go unused and I don’t have time to test them. The console has tabs for “iTunes Server” and “Digital Media Server” and Firefly Media Server is installed. The server did show up as a “Media Server” for my LG Blu-Ray player and I was able to stream a video from the server.

The Lights Out add-in is also included although it is an old version (v0.8) so it needed to be upgrade. The add-in was licensed with an oem license but after the upgrade the license reverted to the trial version. Once the trial is over the license will revert to a community addition license which, according to this, has all the features of v0.8 plus a few more. The upgrade was done like installing any other add-in. I didn’t need to uninstall the original add-in although doing so probably would have been a good idea.

The One-button USB copy is interesting but I’d prefer it didn’t try to think so much. I tested with a drive full of DVD rips. It copied the drive to the public share as expected but then it copied about 50 of the .BUP and .IFO files to the video directory and renamed them to avoid duplicates. Pretty useless on their own and breaking the rip directory since they’re missing. It was also interesting that other files with the same names were left alone. So if you already have files in an organized directory structure this feature may change the structure so you may want to skip it and do a regular copy.

The expansion slot allows a video card to be added should one be needed. But it’s a PCI Express x1 slot which isn’t common among video cards. I’d be more inclined to look for a USB 3 expansion card to add some external drives. It will need to be a low-profile card.

I wish Acer would drop the McAfee AV add-in which I view as nothing but crapware. Even if it worked, it’s still only a 60-day license. The Light-Out adding is outdated but at least it was a full license. The included add-in and its license doesn’t provide any benefit once the latest version is installed.

I attached a Lian-Li EX-503 External Enclosure via the eSata port. The server could see four out of the five drives in the enclosure so the eSata port can handle a port multiplier but only up to four drives. There were also four drives in the server bays. I didn’t do any benchmarking or other testing beyond verifying that drives could be seen.

Power Consumption

I did some quick power measurements using a Kill-a-watt power meter. The server was plugged into the Kill-a-Watt which was plugged into the UPS outlet. I started with all 4 drive bays populated. There were three Western Digital 2 TB EADS drives including the one that shipped with the server as the OS drive. The fourth drive was a Hitachi  Deskstar 7K200 drive (2 TB, 7200 RPM).

With all four drives the power usage was between 52 and 56 watts. The 52 watts was when the server was idle, at least as far as access goes. Some background processes may be running although CPU usage did remain low. The 56 watts was during file copies or drive removal processing although it mostly stayed at 55 watts under load.

I removed the Hitachi drive and usage dropped to 44 to 46 watts with occasional and brief drops below 44 watts. When folder duplication was active the power usage was 46 watts.

With two W20EADS drives installed the power usage was 36 watts while idle and 37 watts while processing a client backup. During folder duplication, when both drives would be active, the power usage was 37 watts.

With just the original drive delivered with the server the power usage was 29 watts while idle.

Drive benchmarks

The benchmarks below are the screenshots of the ATTO benchmark results. ATTO was run locally on the server (double-click for full size).

There’s not much of a difference between C: and D: since they are the same physical drive.

The screenshot below shows the results of a robocopy from my Windows 7 PC to a server share with duplication enabled.

The reported speed for the file transfer was about 2 GB per minute. If my math is right at 8 bits per Byte and 60 seconds per minute that’s about 271 Mbps. Turning the results to MB/s shows a speed of 33.94 MB/s which is significantly slower to the ATTO results run directly on the server, but includes all the server and network overhead. Additional tests produced similar results.

The screenshot below shows the results of a robocopy from the Aspire AH342 to my PC. The copy was started after the server completed drive balancing and wasn’t doing anything else.

Assuming my math is again correct this is 231 Mbps and 28.93 MB/s.

The file copies were done with mostly video files so the average file size was pretty large and there wasn’t a lot of overhead opening a lot of files.

Summary

The price is certainly the big attraction although if you’re going to add three hard drives to max it out the cost will go up considerably at today’s prices. But if you have the drives or can wait for the flood-induced prices to drop it’s worth it. Personally I think a second drive should be added in order to enable folder duplication or to do backups so that will increase the cost.

Returning to Windows Home Server v1 was both nostalgic and a reminder of the frustrations WHS v1 brought. Removing a drive brings down the server while it’s processed which can be time consuming (hours). That’s not something most people will do as a regular activity so it’s not too much of a concern. There was also the occasional slowdown as some process ran (backup cleanup, drive balancing). After using WHS 2011 for about a year WHS V1 just looked and felt old.

I was impressed with the Acer Aspire AH342 Home Server. It will make a good NAS for sharing files and PC backups, which is why it was bought. But it’s not a product someone can buy off the shelf and expect to get running unless they’re familiar with WHS or have only Windows XP and Vista machines. But once the software’s age related issues are worked out it performed well. Plus I like the nice small cube form-factor and it’s quiet. It can be out in the open and on all the time.

When I first wrote about replacing my cable modem I mentioned there didn’t seem to be too much difference in performance. Since then things have changed a bit. Typically CrashPlan would max out it’s upload performance at 2 Mbps. I added another 40 GB to the upload and it uploaded at 4 Mbps. Both speeds where as reported by CrashPlan. So there does seem to have been an improvement.

When I wrote about Cloudberry’s new Continuous Data Protection (CDP) I had decided to use it only for my critical data which had previously been backed up as an hourly basis. Since then there was one failure in that backup plan which caused it to stop and required a manual restart. I also found that email notifications worked in one case for CDP. As it stands now, I don’t have complete confidence in Cloudberry’s CDP, at least in their Windows Home Server 2011 Add-in, so I’ve gone back to an hourly backups for that critical data. I’m no longer using CDP.

I still like my Kindle Fire. I mainly use it for watching video – my own,  Amazon Prime and Amazon purchased. While there isn’t much memory available for local storage I’ve found that the Amazon videos are relatively small (at least the standard def ones). I find the standard def fine for viewing, even on my TV and the smaller size doesn’t needlessly use my capped bandwidth. If the movie deserves high-def I’ll go for a disk. I was able to copy a dozen videos (about 10 hours) locally without a problem and had them during my holiday travels. My own ripped videos are larger so it’s fewer of these. I also do occasional reading but find any LCD screen tiring so it’s usually for less than an hour.

A pet peeve of mine is comparisons between the Kindle and iPad as if it was a buying guide. Here’s my buying guide:  If you’re trying to decide between a Kindle Fire and an iPad then go for a iPad. If you want to watch Amazon video on a tablet, get a Fire. If you meet both criteria then resign yourself to getting both but start with the Fire since it’s cheaper and it might give you what you want in a tablet.

Even though my yearly backup review showed I was in pretty good shape it always gets me thinking about changes but I’m resisting the urge to make a change unless it plugs a gap. There’s a lot of options out there and I’ll probably check out a few. Unless I lose interest first.

Frustrations

My iPhone 4S is giving me problems. The external speaker died on Friday. The headphones work fine. Initially it would come back for short periods but would die soon after I started playing a podcast or song. Luckily it’s now completely dead. I say luckily because it’s much easy to deal with Apple (or any vendor) when they can see the problem themselves. With my luck it probably would have worked when I bring it in for my noon appointment on Saturday. Hopefully it will be quickly resolved.

I’ve been backing up my website to my Mac every night for over 4 years using iCal to schedule a Transmit automator task. Shortly after upgrading to Lion (but not immediately) the schedule task starting crashing, The problem became worse and recently became a daily event. I did the usual stuff like making sure all the software was updated. I also recreated the automator task. The frustrating thing is that if I run the task manually there’s never a problem. But it now consistently fails if it’s triggered by iCal. At this point it’s become part of my nightly routine to trigger the backup. I figure my effort is now better spent getting a backup setup on the web server itself and have it go directly to Amazon S3. So that’s on my project list for the new year although it probably won’t bubble to the top until I get really tired of having to double-click a file each night.

Google Chrome took away side tabs so now they’re back on top. It was never an official feature so I can’t complain too much. Despite that it’s really frustrating to have all those tiny tabs along the tap, differentiated only by their favicon if present. There is a tree tabs add-in i may give a try. I have a similar add-in for Firefox. I’ve considered going back to Firefox but that frustrates me too. The upgrade frequency and the way they do it is annoying. It seems add-ins are always breaking or flagged as not compatible. Add to that the annoying pop-up when there’s an upgrade and it’s drove me away. Google seems to do upgrades right. If I need to restart my browser there’s a little notification in the wrench icon. And after I restart all my tabs are restored, something Firefox doesn’t seem to get right. I really want to like Firefox since Mozilla only cares about a good browser (in theory) and Google and Microsoft consider us the product they sell to advertisers.But Google Chrome has been hard to drop, but the loss of side tabs may help in that area.

Servers and Storage

I’ve had the good fortune of having an Acer Aspire Easystore H342 Home Server pass through my hands. NewEgg has had them at clearance prices and a buddy on mine bought one as a low cost NAS and backup server. It’s Windows Home Server V1 so no doubt Acer is looking to clear them out (hopefully they’ll add a WHS 2011 box to the US market once the V1 is sold out). The price fluctuates but the current $260 is the lowest I’ve seen so far. It’s WHS V1 and not even the latest version of that, so the setup wasn’t straight-forward which is how I got my hands on it. I should have a write-up on it pretty soon. My overall impression is favorable (considering the price). Setting up a version 1 box was both nostalgic and frustrating. The software does feel and look old compared to WHS 2011 but the flashback was fun.

A second server will be staying, at least for awhile. I picked up a Western Digital DX4000 Sentinel Storage Server that runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials which has the same heritage as Windows Home Server 2011. I’m still getting to know it but I have to say that Western Digital got the ease of use right. Even when that Acer H342 was the latest software it’s setup wasn’t as easy as the DX4000. The DX4000 is less flexible in some areas (like supported hard drive and configurations) but that’s the price for ease of use.

I’ve also gotten motivated to start going through old hardware and hard drives to see what I have available and can put together. I’ve got 18 hard drives sitting in a cabinet as file storage. These are older smaller drives that were retired as they were replaced with bigger drives. So my current project is to clean up those drives and safely archive the files that are still needed. Then I should have a few good drives to use for various configuration in my MicroServers.

Another Year Ends

I think the most OS related fun I had this year was the short-lived Ubuntu Home Server project that actually began at the end of 2010. I enjoyed setting up the server and then learning about Linux software RAID. But that project ended in March when I returned to Windows Home Server 2011.  I left Ubuntu as things were getting a bit scary with all that data on it. Not that Ubuntu was scary but my maintaining that RAID array was. But that big WHS 2011 box was still more complicated than I wanted and I became obsessed with the HP MicroServers and my WHS 2011 server has been one of those ever since.

I’ll probably do a build or two this year, although mostly taken from parts I already have, But I’m hoping to spend more time diving into different OS’s and doing some web development.

And it will all be starting with a nice three day holiday weekend.

Happy New Year everyone!

I enabled CDP for my “hourly” backup soon after installing the update. It didn’t work exactly as I expected but the differences didn’t affect the actual backups. I also did some additional stress testing to check out performance and this is what I found.

Using CDP

The CloudBerry blog post said…

Under the hood the changes are captured instantly but the data is uploaded to Cloud storage every 10 minutes.

But I found that the backups occur or are checked for every minute. According to the logs they’re uploaded immediately.  The blog posts also mentions this is configurable although I’ve yet to find where this can be configured in the WHS add-in.

Using CDP takes some getting used to because it changes the way the add-in reports it’s status. It would be less of a problem for someone not used to a regular schedule or is less concerned with checking the status regularly.

The screenshot below shows the status screen for my “hourly” backup several days after CDP was enabled.

Some items of note:

• The job status is always “running”. The status message uses the term “instant backup” when waiting for files to be backed up.
• The “files uploaded” only shows the status for the last “instant backup”. If there was nothing to do then the files uploaded is 0. Checking the history shows that file uploads and purges are taking place as required. So while disconcerting, it’s only a cosmetic problem.
• Since the backup just never ends there’s no email updates for success or errors. I used email to let me know if there was a backup error. The emails only go at the end of a job so even if there are errors (such as an open file) I don’t get an email. In fact, trying to set up an email status report for a CDP backup resulted in a error. This error read more like a bug than a message saying the feature was unavailable.
• Rather than a 10 minute interval, a 60 second countdown begins when a “instant backup” is completed. Any waiting files are then backed up and uploaded to Amazon S3.
• If I stop the backup by clicking “Stop Backup” it doesn’t restart. Rebooting the server does restart the CDP backup jobs.
• Error handling is inconsistent. In my testing the backup would typically ignore errors created by open/locked files. These were valid and when the files where closed they would be backed up. So it was good the job kept running. But there was one instance where a file was moved after being flagged for backup but before it was backed up. This was a valid condition (an iTunes podcast download which downloads to a temp directory and is then moved). The backup job recorded this as an error but then stopped any additional processing. Since CDP backup plans don’t seem to restart on their own this is a problem.

Stress Testing

There wasn’t any noticeable impact changing the my hourly backup to use CDP. The HP MicroServers are relatively low powered and not capable of doing many intense tasks at once. The only add-in I run is the Cloudberry Backup add-in so I was a bit concerned it would impact streaming or other activity. There’s no noticeable load on the server while it’s waiting/looking for updated files. When there’s files to back up the load isn’t any more than the hourly backup and in theory may be less since it spreads the backups out over the hour rather than all at once. Most of the files in this backup plan get updated overnight through automated jobs (website backups, etc…) while the rest of the changes are data file changes. Still I decided to do some load testing.

I copied 121,000 files totaling 60 GB to the same drive I would be streaming a video from. I also copied that set of test files to a second drive. As a control I watched a streaming video while the files were being copied. I RDP’d into the server to do the copies so they were all local drive to drive copies. The streaming worked for awhile until a certain point where it first became slightly annoying until it eventually became unwatchable. At this time there were two file copies going on. One was copying from a directory on the drive (where the files were streaming from) to a second directory on the same drive. Another copy was running from a second drive to the streaming drive.

I have 7 backup plans. A full description can be found in my recent backup review but for purposes of this test I set all backup plans to use CDP. There were three backup plans that matched my test files so they began backing up while the other 4 just watched for files. Each of the test drives had a backup plan dedicated to them and would be doing local backups to eSATA drives so the backup wouldn’t be hindered by network or other limitations. So each drive would be backing up as quickly as the data could be read and written to disk. The third plan included all four drives in the server and backed up to a NAS. So this would be reading from both test drives but only one at a time.

Like the file copies my video stream started off fine and ran for awhile but then it became annoying as it would frequently stop and need to catch up. So no worse than a comparable file copy although still too annoying to be acceptable (while subjective, I doubt anyone would be happy). Not surprising since the backup is not much more than a file copy.

Once the backups were done and the backup plans were just watching I didn’t have a problem streaming and reading files off the server.  Deleting the test files and then letting Cloudberry update their status (I save deleted files for several days so they weren’t actually purged) didn’t affect streaming.

Summary

The good news was that my testing showed that CDP didn’t add any significant overhead above the actual file copies. The bad news is my server isn’t designed to handle a lot of simultaneous activity or file copies. Because of the way I have the shares and rives set up and the way I use the server I may not notice an impact even with CDP set on all plans. Two of the plans go to destinations that aren’t always online so CDP isn’t a good option for them and the other plans rarely have simultaneous changes. Still, CDP is far from a universal solution for me.

I’ve left CDP enabled for what was my hourly backup to Amazon S3 but I’ve returned all the other backup plans to their previous schedule. A lot of times there’s no need for immediate backup and I’d rather wait until all updates are made or a set of files is fully processed. Because of what I send to Amazon S3 I’m less likely to have issues and it’s been fine since being enabled. I do fel I need to monitor it more than I did when I used a hourly backup, if only to make sure it’s still running and that may end up being enough to go back to an hourly schedule if I don’t become more comfortable with CDP’s reliability.

[Update Dec 30, 2011]: I was able to configure email notifications for one CDP plan and it did send a notification when that plan ended with a failure. Unfortunately the CDP plans don’t restart on their own when an error is encountered so I’ve gone back to an hourly schedule for critical backups.

All my data is kept on my Windows Home Server so my backup strategy is centered around it. And yea, many would probably consider it a bit overboard since I go way above the three file rule for the important stuff.

Windows Home Server Backups

Cloudberry Backup for Windows Home Server

I’ve been using the Cloudberry WHS add-in for most of the year and it’s served me well. I have 7 backup plans configured and they back up to 6 destinations. In total, I’m currently backing up a tad under 6 TB of data on the Windows Home Server with all of that 6 TB going to at least two different locations.

The important stuff gets backed up every hour to Amazon S3. This currently totals 13.6 GB of data which include versions going back a month. I also keep deleted files for 10 days before they’re purged. I do compress and encrypt the data that goes to S3. I compress because I pay for bandwidth/space and I encrypt since it’s in the cloud. This means I need to use Cloudberry to do any restores. Cloudberry does support server-side encryption in Amazon S3 but I do the encryption using my own key within the Cloudberry software before it leaves my PC. Cloudberry just added Real-time data protection (a.k.a. continuous backup) which I’m currently testing instead of hourly. I haven’t used it enough to decide whether to use it instead of the hourly schedule.

My Windows Home Server has four data drives and also four data backup drives. So there’s a Cloudberry backup plan for each data drive/backup drive pair. I use the drive level backup (rather than share level) option to select the files for backup. For each data drive I select the “Server Folders” directory on the drive and backup everything it contains. This avoids the recycle bin, shadow copies and other non-data files. These run once a night about an hour apart and everything gets backed up. Since alls the drives are local SATA or eSATA the backup is pretty quick. The initial backups did take awhile, especially since the MicroServers aren’t speed demons.

I have a second server in the house that’s currently running Windows Server 2008. The hardware was my original WHS 2011 hardware but at this point I haven’t repurposed it so it runs Windows Server 2008 and serves as a backup destination, I power it up every weekend and manually trigger the backups. There are two backup plans setup but they go to the same file share on the server. There’s one plan for Video and there’s another plan for everything else. The main reason for two plans is a hold over from the days when I was backing up a lot of video. The “Everything Else” backup typically takes longer since it goes through hundreds of thousands of files and backs up tens of thousands although the total data is relatively small.

I don’t compress or encrypt any of the local backups. I can go directly to the file system and pull out the files if I need them although I do need the software if I want to more easily find versions or maintain the file structure.

CrashPlan Backup

I recently began using CrashPlan for additional offsite backup. It’s an economical way to store a lot of data offsite. It doesn’t officially support WHS but it’s been working well. I’ve had a couple occasions where it stopped doing backups and I had to cycle the service on the server. But the test restores have been fine. Now that the initial backups are done I’ve limited the backups to between 2AM and 7AM every day and I’ve throttled the bandwidth. I currently backup everything except video.  I’m currently backing up 288 GB to CrashPlan. The problem with that amount of data is my bandwidth cap of 250 GB. So if I ever need to do a full restore I’ll either need to wait two months or have them send me the data on a drive.

Windows Home Server Native Backup

I have an external drive attached and use the WHS native backup to save the files needed for a OS recovery. My testing doesn’t include a OS restore although it did work way back when I needed it. Worst case is an OS and add-in re-install then restore the data.

Sneakernet Offsite

As part of my offsite backups I have two 2 TB drives that I rotate offsite. Every week I bring one to my office desk drawer and bring the other home. The drive at home is attached to my Windows 7 PC and every night a batch files runs Robocopy to update the drive with everything that’s not a video file. This drive is encrypted (Truecrypt) so I don’t have to worry if it’s stolen from my desk.

Backup Shortcomings

There’s no offsite backup for my videos. I have two backups in the house along with the original source disks but if the worst happens to the house there’s nothing off site. I figure I’d have more to worry about than the videos and that is what insurance is for. I used to keep copies of the ripped videos on drives offsite but that became a hassle to keep updated as the number of drives grew. Especially since I tended to use old, retired 1 TB or smaller drives.

I need the software (CrashPlan or Cloudberry) to do a restore. Being able to pick a file from the local backups can work in a pinch but that would be an exception. In the past I used to keep the same shares on another server and do a share to share robocopy every night. In theory this made it easy to quickly switch to the new server. Now that I have several Micro Servers I’ve approached a hardware failure by already having a duplicate of anything in house and I can swap hardware around and restore any lost files. Actually, I don’t have duplicates of some of hardware used for backups, but as there’s redundancy across the backups I figure I can lose updates to one while I wait for a new part. Of course, the failure will come at the worst time.

Windows PC & Virtual Machine Backups

This is simple. I use Windows Home Server 2011 backup  to backup my Windows 7 PCs and virtual machines. As I said, data is on the Windows Home Server itself so there’s not really much data to back up. To keep backups small I exclude the Virtual Machine disk files from backup. For testing I just went in and pulled a couple files out of the backup, I didn’t do a full restore.

In 2010 I used Jungle Disk for to do some Offsite Windows backups but I no longer use it. I don’t do any backups directly from a Windows PC to any offsite destination. Everything goes to WHS.

Mac Mini Backups

For my Mac Mini (Desktop) I use SuperDuper to clone the hard drive every night. This gives me a disk I can boot from should my Mini’s drive fail. I also use Time Machine to back things up. Time Machine is a hold over from when I kept local data on the Mac. It’s useful should I need to recover an old configuration file so I keep it.

I also run Arc Backup on the Mini to backup files to Amazon S3. I back up my application support folder along with my Documents folder (which is mostly empty). I have Arq Backup limited to $1/mth in Amazon charges which limits it to over 10 GB although it’s still only using 2.9 GB

In 2010 I used Jungle Disk to do my offsite Mac backups but didn’t like the direction the software was taking. Plus it didn’t support Amazon Reduced Redundancy Storage which would increase my costs.

MacBook Air Backups

I have a Seagate Portable drive I attach when I’m home and do a Time Machine backup to it. I’ll also pack it if I’ll be traveling for a few days but it typically stays home for short trips. I do use the encryption feature of time machine in case the drive gets lost.

I also use Arq Backup on the Air and it’s also limited to $1/mth (or 10.75 GB). Because it’s a laptop so does have more files locally, at least at times, there’s currently 3.9 GB stored on Amazon S3. I limit the backups to data files and a few configuration files. This is useful if I’m traveling since it moves the files far from the laptop.

Amazon S3

Amason S3 pricing isn’t the most straightforward because there are charges for bandwidth and other operations in addition to space used. My total Amazon S3 charge for November was $3.52 and this is pretty standard although down a bit from September and October when it was $4. The November charge was $1.81 for the storage and $1.71 for those other charge, I use the Amazon Reduced Redundancy Storage option to keep costs down. I’m saving a total of 19 GB with Amazon S3. Amazon does offer Free Usage Tier which is not included in my prices as it’s only good for a year.

Summary

My Windows Home Server backup software of choice is Cloudberry since it’s so flexible. It’s gotten new features since I started using it and while I don’t use them all it’s nice to see the software gets continual care. CrashPlan is my choice if there’s a requirement to store a lot of files in the cloud. CrashPlan is a bit less flexible when it comes to local sources but it is a better choice if you want more offsite flexibility.

Arq Backup is my choice for Mac backups and replace Jungle Disk. In addition to a feature set I prefer, Arq backup does an excellent job of handling file attributes and file bundles that are common on the Mac platform.

Are you sure your backups work? You do backups, right?