Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

In a previous post, I discussed the virtues of having an automated backup process. I gave the advice of having an external drive or file server as well as some offsite backups. I’ve since changed my mind.

I had some troubles configuring my file server to properly go to sleep and wake up when needed, so the file server ended up staying on all the time. Armed with my trusty kill-a-watt, I determined that it was costing me almost $5 a month in power to keep that PC up and running. Also, it started acting flakey, not a good attribute for a dedicated backup server! Finally, like many people, every time I get some extra storage space, I tend to fill it with stuff rather than leave it for backups.

I did some more testing and planning, and eventually decided to go with Mozy for online offsite backups. For $5 a month, you can back up as much data as you want, secure, encrypted and offsite. Mozy runs in your system tray and unobstrusively encrypts and uploads your files to their servers when your computer is idle. Before, I wasn’t backing up all of my file - I deemed my 100GB of home video projects too large to keep redundant copies of, but since Mozy offers unlimited storage, there’s no reason not to back that up.

Since your $5 buys you the ability to back up one PC, I’ve installed it on my desktop PC downstairs and set up processes to copy important files from our laptops onto that PC for backup. With Mozy you can back up any folders you want. I’ve tried recovering files too, and everything worked fine. Afterall, an untested backup is an untrusted backup.

Oh yeah, I should probably mention there’s a free option as well, if you don’t have much data to store. If you click on the Mozy link above, you’ll get an increase in your storage space through the referral program.

For the record, I did try Carbonite as well, but I didn’t like the lack of options nor did I like the fact that they don’t back up some file types. Also, it just plain didn’t upload for me, but maybe I had a firewall issue or something.

One thing you need to be aware of: offsite backups over a cable modem are SLOW! My initial backups (125GB) literally took MONTHS to complete. It’s not Mozy’s fault though. If you do the math, I was maxing out my upload bandwidth nearly the entire time. After the initial upload, Mozy only uploads the changes, so keeping current isn’t bad. About the only way to get around this speed limitation is by using Sneakernet.

All-in-all, I’m happy with my new scheme. $5 a month is a small price to pay for constant offsite backups, and now that I don’t do the local backups anymore, I have more disk space to play with! With two kids to play with, there are much better things to spend my time on than managing my backup server or performing manual backups. While that initial backup period required me to be a bit patient, Mozy has taken one item off my list of things to worry about.

I’ve got a new building project, and I needed some graph paper to do my design work. You can always go buy a pad of special graph paper, but I found that you can download PDFs of graph paper and print them at home.

There are a lot of choices, but one I like is from Incompetech.com. I use the multi-weight PDF generator to create exactly the grid I need.

Also, there are many choices for free music staff paper as well.

While I’m at it, I thought I’d post my recommendation that everyone gets the appropriate number of carbon monoxide detectors for your home. Both my brother and sister have passed out from separate carbon monoxide poisoning incidents (don’t worry, they were OK). If you need a story to convince you, read this old post from Paul.

As you might have guessed from the previous post’s title, I have more than one piece of wisdom to impart. I have a question for you: “Are you backing up your data?”

To cut the the chase, I recently had my 400GB Western Digital My Book external hard drive fail. I don’t know exactly what happened to it, but it got a number of bad sectors, meaning there were lots of files that I couldn’t read. It should be noted that I’m actually pretty good about redundancy and backups, but this was my working drive for video editing projects. In general, files on this drive are usually captured video from a tape, some in-progress work, and renders to be written to DVD. Most of these files are replaceable (by recapturing from tape, re-rendering, etc.) but not all of them. Basically, I didn’t back up this drive simply because I didn’t have the redundant storage space to do so.

Since the drive didn’t fail altogether, I was able to try a number of things to recover some of my data. The file allocation tables were OK, but some of the files were inaccessible due to “CRC errors” when trying the copy them. The first step in my recovery was to use Robocopy to move all of the complete non-corrupted files to another drive. Robocopy is a command line copy tool, but what makes it great is its ability to skip files that fail. After running Robocopy, I had a new folder on another drive with all of my safe files and the corrupted files were left on the failing drive.

Now that I had a drive full of corrupted files, I took a look to see which files were important to me. Some had been backed up to DVDs, other projects had been finished, and other files were available on other drives. I decided there was only one file worth trying to salvage: a 600 MB wave file holding an audio commentary that a few friends and I had recorded for one of our home videos. If I weren’t stupid, I would have backed up that file somewhere else, and to make things worse, I’d just tossed the marked-up copy of the “script” a couple of days before. At any rate, I wanted the data out of this file, even if it was incomplete. I tried a number of utilities such as Unstoppable Copier, Copycat, etc. but the ones I had the best luck with were called CopyItAnyway and JFileRecovery. As the names suggest, these utilities grab whatever data can be read and ignore those sectors that are bad. After all was said and done, I’d recovered all but a couple of minutes of audio from that file. The bad sections were just silent. I’d rather not have lost the file, but I can work with what’s left.

Here’s the advice section. If you have files you don’t want to use, you need to back them up! In my opinion, this backup needs to be automatic and scheduled, because most of us are lazy and won’t do the backups regularly if it’s a manual process. You can back up to another computer, an offsite server, CDs/DVDs or an external hard drive. Anything is better than nothing, but in my opinion, your first priority is to guard against hardware failure and your second priority is offsite backups to guard against a problem with your home (like a flood, house fire, etc.)

My backups are done to both a dedicated file server in my house (just an old computer I had lying around) and to an offsite FTP server. Here’s my process, for reference:

• Every night, my laptop, my desktop and Dusty’s laptop back up their important files (documents, mail, photos, etc.) to the file server.
• Every monday night, the file server backs up my photos and audio projects to my offsite FTP server
• Weekly, I have processes to back up my Remember The Milk tasks, Google Calendar events, and other online services to the file server.
• Weekly, I back up my web host (on which this site is hosted) to the file server.

Additionally, when I get around to it (see warning above), I burn my photos to DVD and keep a copy in my desk at work. The photos are already duplicated in three different places, but they’re the most important data I have.

If you need some software for automating your backups, check out SyncBack (for Windows). I purchased the full version for $30, but the freeware version is pretty good too.

Many many times people have brought me computers and asked for help in recovering their data. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Your best bet is to never find yourself in that situation. Do one of two things: do your backups today, or decide that you won’t miss any of your data. If you need help, don’t hesitate to ask!

Edit: here’s a good post on Lifehacker for backing up your Google apps data. I use most of these services so it’s a helpful article.

On Thursday, we had an unfortunate malfunction. The water level switch in our washing machine failed to trip. The switch is the device in a washer that detects when enough water has entered the tub. As you can probably imagine, that switch failing means that the washer will continue to “fill” well past the point where water overflows the tub. An hour after I started the cycle, I went downstairs to move the clothes to the dryer, and that’s when I discovered that the initial fill was planning on being infinite…

Fortunately, our laundry room is in the basement, so while the laundry room was flooded, the garage got wet, and the hallway carpet was soaked, cleanup wasn’t terrible and there wasn’t much permanent damage. We don’t keep anything of value on the floor down there just in case.

Here’s where things get stupid. After doing some troubleshooting and fooling with it, the switch was activating properly. I figured maybe I’d dislodged a blockage in the hose. So, we continued to wash a few loads, carefully ensuring that the fill was stopping properly. On Saturday, however, I walked off and left it again, this time spilling a half-hour of water on the floor. This time, I decided the hose connecting the tub to the water level switch was loose and leaking, so I repaired that.

Rather than trust the repair this time, I’ve taken some steps to help avoid a problem in the event that this part fails again:

1. I installed a plastic pan under the washer. This pan will collect the water from an internal leak, but it will only hold a finite amount
2. I found an automatic switch at Menard’s (about $20). It shuts off power to the washer in the event that its probe detects water. I put the probe in the pan, so if the water level switch fails again, it will shut off the washer

This should take care of my immediate concern: a failure of the water level switch. However, there are a number of other potential problems in that room yet to address, including a burst line to the washer, some other failure inside the washer, a leaking water heater, etc. Here’s what else I have done or plan on doing soon:

1. Water alarms - for as little as $7, you can get a battery powered alarm that screams when it gets wet. Putting some of these in the laundry room will at least let me know immediately that there’s a problem (as long as I’m home…)
2. Plumb the overflow pan to a drain - you can run a pipe from the overflow pan to the floor drain. If the washer fails, this will direct the water harmlessly to the drain, as long as you use a big enough pipe, that is.
3. Water heater pan - just like the washer pan, you can get a pan for under the water heater, complete with an outlet for draining to the floor drain.
4. Stainless steel lines - our washer came with plastic hoses to hook up the washer to the house plumbing. We immediately replaced them with braided stainless steel lines to lessen the chances of a burst line.

If you haven’t taken any of these steps, I’d consider thinking these tips through. For those of you who have main floor or second floor laundries without any containment measures, I’d make it a significant priority. If you don’t, make sure you have a shop vac.

I still love my Toyota Tundra, but I think they’ve made a marketing mistake in one of their latest commercials.

In the commercial I saw recently, a construction worker pulls up in a new Tundra on a job site. A coworker says to him, “A Toyota?”, to which the driver simply replies, “Get in.” In the next scene, the truck returns to the same site, this time loaded down, covered in mud, and pulling a trailer with a skid steer loader. Another onlooker asks “A Toyota?”, to which the new passenger replies, “Get in.”

The problem I have is their choice of actor for the role of “Tundra driver.” Unless I’m mistaken, the actor is Eric Allan Kramer. He’s a tough-lookin’ guy, so at first glance he’s a good choice. The problem is the role I remember him from. He played the minor character “Bear” in American Wedding. “Bear” (such a clever name) sure looks tough, but the main characters meet him in a gay bar where he gets involved in a dance-off.

I don’t mean to typecast the guy, and he was HILARIOUS in the movie, but I don’t know if that commercial is going to help Toyota capture the tough-guy market, at least not among those who are overly self-conscious

Just the other night I was cruising the logs for this site, and it reminded me of a post I’ve been wanting to make.

Despite having very little meaningful content, I’ve had somewhere around a quarter million hits on this site, and I’ve had quite a few search terms end up in the top few hits on search engines. Here are a few that have been near the top recently:

• “Atterberry” (not surprising…)
• “playset landscaping”
• “construx”
• “homebuilt recumbent bike”
• “remember the milk reviews”
• “battery tester AA homemade”
• “highest vocal note”

There are also a number of people whose names, if searched for, lead directly to this site. That got me thinking… There are a number of long-lost friends that I’d like to hear from, just to see what’s going on in their lives, etc. I haven’t been able to find them by searching the internet, but that’s mostly because of the common names. How do I know I’ve found the right person? At any rate, I thought I’d try an experiment. I’ll post those names here in hopes that some of them will find this post when searching for their own name. I figure there’s a better chance of them searching for their own name than searching for mine!

Disclaimer: my apologies if you read this post but don’t find your own name here… I’d still like to hear from you! I’ll probably add more names to this list later.

Ok, here goes:

• John Johnson - Bradley University, Heitz Hall in 1995 and Castle Rock, Washington (any wonder I can’t find him!?)
• Brent Meyers - Havana, IL
• Mike Webber - Havana, IL
• Mike Rayburn - Havana, IL

Ok, here’s the news I’m sure most of you have been waiting for for the last fifteen years…

People magazine is reporting hints of a New Kids on the Block reunion!

This may not be a bad move… all of those screaming pre-teens at their concerts in 1990 are now in their late twenties.

We posted some more photos of Evan (it’s been a while). Months 28 through 33 are new. Take a look on the photos page.

Ok, I haven’t posted anything in a while, but this is exciting (to me, at least). It looks like Gmail is going to support access through IMAP!

Basically, that means you’ll be able to work with your Gmail account from an email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) better than you can today. Instead of just downloading messages from Gmail into your client, it will sync two ways.

I’m interested to see the details on how they handle IMAP folders using the Gmail labels.