Web Collaboration Revisited

Two years ago I looked at Web Collaboration tools. My conclusion was "Close but no cigar."

This Lifehacker article prompted me to revisit the topic.

Sadly there doesn't seem to be much news here.

Lifehacker said:

There are really just two collaboration tools in Word:

• Track Changes allows you to visibly keep track of each person’s revisions within a document. Added text shows up in a different color for each person who’s made changes. Deleted text also changes color and appears struck through with a line. When it’s time to review the document, you can accept or reject each individual change.

• Comments annotate a document with notes that don’t really belong in the document text itself. These notes appear in the right margin, are color coded along the same lines as tracked changes, and include the commenter’s initials.

Really?

Maybe Lifehacker missed something. PCworld looked at this and found:

When you start collaborating from the desktop, a pop-up notification appears at the bottom of the app to alert you that someone else is editing the document. But in our tests in Word, Excel, and OneNote, several minutes passed before the desktop user received the notification. In some cases, changes to the document were available before we were notified that another person was editing the document.

Thinking/hoping that that still wasn't the situation I went to the horse's mouth, Microsoft Office Support.

Not so much.

Geotagging III

This is a two part blog post. Be sure to read both parts.

Part I

Well, not exactly geotagging. Finally I found a camera that does a satisfactory job of geotagging on its own.

But I'm still into logging my location, particularly on trips. For example on a recent trip to Italy I created several maps (here's one).

From my previous research into geotagging I had concluded:

...if you have an Android phone? Don't even bother.

But I've changed phones since then so I thought I'd give Android another chance.

You'll remember that Google "spring cleaned" Google Latitude. But you can still get location history from your Android phone. From a geotagging/geotracking perspective that's what you want.

So I did an bake-off.

I compared Google Now location history to GPSLogger for Android (on my 2013 Moto X) to GPSLogger for Blackberry (on a BlackBerry Bold).

This GIF compares the tracks from all 3 tools.

There are a couple of conclusions. First Google Now's location history is pretty good. However it seems to have it's own mind about when to take a GPS fix. It increases its frequency when it determines that you're moving and slows down when you stop. But the result is that if when you start moving shortly after a fix it may be 5 minutes or more before it takes another fix. I believe that that results in the odd "jumps" in the Google Now location history.

On GPSLogger for Android I have the fix frequency set to one minute. This results in less of those odd "jumps" but they're still there.

I have no explanation as to why both Google Now and GPSLogger for Android indicate that I traveled to the I-55/I-69 junction near the bottom left of the map. One can only surmise that the GPS processor in the Moto X is not very good. But I don't think that this is particular to the Moto X. My previous efforts with GPS logging on Android were on Samsung Galaxys and they had the same results.

Once again GPSLogger for BlackBerry blew away the other alternatives. As I said in my Geotagging II post:

a BlackBerry is a first class method to geotag your photos.

For full disclosure I had GPSLogger for BlackBerry set to take a fix every 30 seconds. This is a remnant from my geotagging efforts. I believe for simply recording a track of travels that every 60 seconds is more than sufficient. Obviously this will reduce the battery impact on the BlackBerry.

Part II

This has continued to bother me. Today when I was driving (actually stopped at a light) I looked at the screen for GPSLogger.

It's getting my location from cell towers. Why? GPS Test was getting 21 satellites!

Why wasn't GPSLogger using them?

I had Android's Settings / Location / Mode set to "High accuracy." (screen capture taken later)

But wait. Read the description for "High accuracy." It says "Use GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile networks to determine location." "(M)obile networks" means "cell towers" to GPSLogger.

So it looks like "High accuracy" isn't really high accuracy. KitKat seems to be preferring the lower battery impact of cell towers over GPS accuracy.

When I set Android's "Location mode" to "Device only" (GPS) look at the result from Google Now.

Notice the "jump" that I highlighted at 9:03AM. And there are a couple of similar ones to the left (earlier). The track tightens up after 9:03AM. I turned on "Device only" at 9:06AM. Those "jumps" are apparently the result of using cell towers with improper location signatures.

Could that really be it? So I Googled for a while and found this.

if i use 'device GPS only' it works fine. widgets and weather data are correct within a few feet. in High Accuracy mode it tends to put me in the wrong place. often another state or country, or it shows my current location as the location of a cell tower (and GNow tells me i'm like 20 mins from home when i'm already there). in this mode, it seems to never use GPS radio at all, relying entirely on wifi and cell towers. this wasn't always part of the location settings, it just showed up with the update.

Hmmm.

So I went to the GPSLogger web site and found this feature.

Selectively choose network, gps and passive location providers

Then back to GPSLogger and Performance / Location Providers.

So I unchecked "Network" and "Passive."

Now look at the result.

I realize that this is a pretty coarse view so here's a zoom in at one location.

Pretty good.

This seems to have significantly improved Android's GPS tracking. It certainly will have an impact on battery life though. Time will tell.

My thinking is to leave Android's "Location mode" to "High accuracy." Generally that works good enough for Google Now's Location History. And I'm going to set GPSLogger Performance / Location Providers to "GPS." That way I'll get more precise logging (and more battery impact) when I want it.

Thanks to gifmaker.me for their online animated GIF tool.

RAID Problems

RAID is good. Right? Keep on reading.

First read this article in The Register.

tl;dr - "Rebuild times are so long that the chances of an unrecoverable read error (URE) occurring are dangerously high."

Here's the long version.

RAID 5 uses a parity set to recover from a failed drive. The problem is that spinning disks are getting larger. This increases the chance of an unrecoverable read error occurring during the rebuild of a failed drive from the parity set. Your data is gone at that point.

The math behind this is really complicated but here's the punch line:

Consumer magnetic disk error rate is ... an error every 12.5TB.

Now let's look at that for today's big drives.

Putting this into rather brutal context, consider the data sheet for the 8TB Archive Drive from Seagate. This has an error rate of 10^14 bits. That is one URE every 12.5TB. That means Seagate will not guarantee that you can fully read the entire drive twice before encountering a URE.

Gulp!

How big are the drives in your RAID? Mine are 2TB consumer class.

What's a person to do?

Buy more expensive drives.

Enterprise magnetic disk error rate is ... an error every 125TB.

That reduces the failure rate by an order of magnitude.

The elapsed time of the rebuild is still problematic. Realizing that a Drobo (1st generation) is not an enterprise class RAID system my experience is that the Drobo rebuild time is in excess of 24 hours per TB.

Or buy SSDs.

Enterprise SSD error rates are ... an error every 12.5PB.

That gets you another order of magnitude. But those are expensive.

There are alternative RAID modes that give more protection and better recovery time as well.

Big Blue Clouds

I've recently added Ben Kepes to my reading list. The Forbes web site is awfully heavy with clutter but I let Adblock Plus do its thing.

A recent article was about IBM (hence "Big Blue" in the title) and their cloud activities.

Ben drug out all the old stories, e.g. Watson winning Jeopardy and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" but went on to relate a conversation that he had with Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM’s Cloud business.

LeBlanc's comments are full of platitudes - "No enterprise is going to lift trillions of dollars of existing assets into the cloud." and "New development will happen in the cloud, but existing assets will stay put."

Then LeBlanc got into classic IBM speak. Kepes asked him if IBM "would begin to zero rate international traffic." LeBlanc's response was that "high availability is important."

Huh?

Kepes did call out IBM on their continual claims to be the biggest cloud vendor. "I've not seen any independent commentator who gives their claims any real credence."

An Order of Magnitude Improvement in Compute Density

Remember 2 1/2 years ago I posted on the emergence of ARM servers. It's taken a while but they're being adopted by mainstream enterprises.

During Applied Micro's 4Q conference call CEO and president Paramesh Gop said:

PayPal achieved "... an order of magnitude improvement in compute density"

That's the kind of leap you have to have to displace x86. This reminds me of the transition from mainframes to x86. But remember that RISC systems made a brief appearance during that time. ARM may not be the next big thing.

It's going to be interesting over the next couple of years.

Walled Gardens

At lunch with a friend recently we were discussing messaging directions. While his perspective was for a Fortune 100 corporation and mine is for our much smaller consulting organization, we were running into the same issues.

The players in the messaging sector are creating walled gardens to tie you into their ecosystem. I'm sure that they would argue that it is to "improve the customer experience" and it may very well do that for the in-house customers but isolates them from the rest of the world.

Here are a couple of examples that I've run into recently in my space:

Facebook ends support for AIM chat integration 

On April 15th 2015, Facebook is making an update to their API (application program interface) that affects how AIM and other applications connect to Facebook. 

As part of the API update, Facebook will remove support for third party clients like AIM to integrate with their chat feature. You will continue to receive Facebook notifications in your AIM Updates feed and everything else you’ve come to know and love about AIM will stay the same.

Google Talk was a player for a while.

Google moves away from the XMPP open-messaging standard 

Google has since admitted that it is indeed shrinking its support for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). 

XMPP was meant to enable users from one Internet communication network to be able to talk to a friend or co-worker on another such network. So, for example, an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user could talk to his co-worker on Google Talk and vice-versa. 

May 28, 2013 

I used to use imo.im but they withdrew into their own walled garden.

Popular messaging app imo.im to end support for third-party IM networks starting Mar. 3

In emails sent out to users on Friday, imo announced that it will be discontinuing support for all third-party instant messaging networks to focus on a build-out of its own platform. 

February 28, 2014

What do I use now? Ironically I use the web interface of aim.com. It still supports Google Talk. And it'll send SMS.

I'm a little embarrassed.

Vestalink Confusion

I've posted before about my use of Vestalink. It always worked well for me. When Google and Obihai reached an agreement I moved back to pure Google Voice but left Vestalink in place for E911.

Initially the package from Vestalink was $39.99 for 2000 incoming/outcoming minutes/month. When it came up for renewal it was $79.99 for the same package. That made me step back and think about it.

Coincidentally as the renewal approached I had posted about Your Father's Phone Service triggered by the senior citizens on their home page. Within a month I got this comment:

Ryan Tilton said...
Hi Ben:
We are actually doing landing page testing. Since fatherly individuals might be looking for a land-line replacement we were thinking this picture might lead to good conversions. We still do not have enough data to see if this is a good picture or not. But it is good to hear your feedback on it. It would be great if you could start a discussion on the validity of the official obihai support. I think there is some interesting things going on a Google right now with Nova (the new cell phone service). I believe that the "official" support Obihai is claiming is just to sell more units before Google voice is finally merged into hangouts later this year. VoIP is not free like email. Google is taking huge losses to support this network, they have to monetize it eventually. I think Nova is the ultimate result. Great blog by the way!

Ryan Tilton is the owner of Vestalink. He encouraged me to "start a discussion on the validity of the official obihai support" and suggested that the "'official' support Obihai is claiming is just to sell more units before Google voice is finally merged into hangouts later this year."

I did whine at him about increasing his rates.

..even the 500 minute plan is almost twice what I paid initially. Have your costs actually INCREASED this dramatically? Doesn't feel right.

He replied:

We want to significantly improve the software so we are raising prices to hire some programmers for system updates and better overall user experience.

And he lowered my rate for one year to the original $39.99. I still let the package expire.

Then recently I get an e-mail:

Vestalink Now Works With Google Voice

Uh, notice the picture! And it's still on the Vestalink homepage.

Then another e-mail:

Vestalink launches GVsip - GVsip allows you to use your Google Voice account with any VoIP device.

I'm getting dizzy.

Google's Toe

How did Google stump their toe so badly?

Read the fine print in this Google Apps Status Dashboard.

smtp.gmail.com is displaying an invalid certificate.

tl;dr Google let their smtp certificate expire on a holiday weekend.

Perhaps Google could put a reminder on their calendar to help them not to overlook this again. Better yet, put it on an Outlook calendar.

There's a good recap of it here.

RAVPower FileHub

We're planning a long trip this spring and I got to thinking about how to get media available for our granddaughter. Since I'm cheap frugal most of my iDevices are only 16GB and after iOS 8.1 there's not much room left for movies.

My first thought was to spread the media around, some on my iPad Air, some on my wife's iPhone 5S, some on my Moto X, etc. That was going to be confusing at best.

Then in my Deals RSS feed popped up a RAVPower FileHub. It's hard to explain what this gadget does. I'll start with sharing the description from Amazon.

RAVPower FileHub Built-in 6000mAh External Battery Pack & Charger with Wireless N Portable Pocket Travel Router, Wireless Micro SD TF Card Reader, Wireless USB, Wireless Flash, Mobile Storage Media Sharing, WLAN Hot Spot & NAS File Server

Whew!

It's got a connector for everything and it weighs 5.5 ounces. Its size is 2.9 x 2.8 x 0.9 inches.

I had been looking for a battery pack for my mobile devices anyway and my travel router is only 802.11g.

This seemed like it was too good to be true but it all seems to work.

I found an unused 32GB microSD card in my stash to contain the media.

It came already charged and when I turned it on it presented a Wi-Fi network named "FileHub-XXXX". You can connect to this with your PC with a password of "11111111". There's a web UI (10.10.10.254) that will let you update the firmware and configure the device.

There are iOS and Android apps in the respective app stores. Not only can you stream media from the microSD card to your Wi-Fi device(s up to 5) but the app has a player for media already on the phone or tablet. From your laptop browser just go to 10.10.10.254 and there's a media player served from the device.

If you give the app access to your device's media, you can download the media from the device to the FileHub using either the microSD or an external USB drive. Similarly if you access this from your laptop browser you can download files from the laptop to the FileHub using either the microSD or an external USB drive basically making it a microSD/USB adapter.

All this worked perfectly and I haven't found anything that it won't play although pretty much all my media is H.264.

I flashed the firmware to the latest rev.

I have used it as a Wi-Fi WISP device bridging my Wi-Fi to another SSID with NAT in the middle. Just what you need for Starbucks. It will also function as a pure NAT router generating its own SSID from Ethernet input.

The charging output is 1A so it probably won't do well charging an iPad.

Awesome!

Cloud Reliability Showdown

I keep following enterprise cloud technology and services. Ben Kepes is one of the bloggers I follow. He had a recent article analyzing a report from CloudEndure that compares the reliability of Amazon's AWS.to Microsoft's Azure in 2014.

The article is full of graphs and good analysis but his summary hits the nail on the head:

Outages happen - there is no way of avoiding mentioning that fact. But as Netflix has so successfully demonstrated, it is through planning for failure that organizations can achieve the very highest levels of reliability for their applications. Thinking about multiple points of redundancy for every service, every connection and every vendor an application uses is a good start.

See my article on Netflix.

And the he puts a point on it:

Both services are great and both show amazing reliability (as an aside, that reliability is far higher than most on-premises infrastructure) - the key takeaway from this report is that not planning for failure is a huge risk for organizations.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Google Apps vs Office

Business Insider recently had an article on how Google plans to "nab 80% of Microsoft's Office business."

Google's plan is:

1. Make sure that the apps Google offers have "85-90% of the functionality" of Office.
2. Don't worry about the remaining 10-15% of the features required by power users, particularly Excel.
3. Support Office documents as a "first-class citizen."
4. Don't try and convince enterprises to convert from Microsoft Office to Google Apps.
5. Teach them to become power users.
6. Get new customers hooked on products other than Apps.
7. Show them how Google's cloud helps mobile workers.

Yeah, right.

Although I'm a huge proponent and user of Google's office apps for my personal use, there is no alternative to Microsoft Office documents in an enterprise environment. Segregating users into "have's" and "have not's" is going to be extremely difficult.

Apple Cloud Outage

Now we have a new player in the battle of (un)availability in the cloud. On March 11, 2015 Apple's iTunes store was down for 10 plus hours.

But look closer at that web page. First, we could see that web page unlike one of Microsoft's outages. Second, nothing was down but the App Store. iCloud Account & Sign In - Up. iCloud Backup - Up. iTunes in the Cloud - Up. And on and on.

And Apple acknowledged the same day that the downtime was caused by problems with its DNS setup.

The other cloud players could learn something from Apple.

Internet Bandwidth - February 2015

This is an update of my Internet Bandwidth post of June 2014.

The stacked bars are Comcast cable bandwidth. The yellow line is AT&T wireless bandwidth (scale is on right axis). The units are KB so 100,000 represents 100GB. The blue is the difference in what Comcast reports versus what my router reports.

I upgraded my AT&T plan to Mobil Share Value with 10GB in January 2014. AT&T upgraded my Mobil Share Value from 10GB to 15GB for the same price in November 2014. 

I started using CrashPlan Central for backups in December 2014. With CrashPlan Central uploads I've bumped into Comcast's bandwidth cap of 300GB. CrashPlan has good controls to manage its bandwidth usage and the initial upload is complete.

Screen Size Fragmentation

I'm a big user of Pocket Casts and got to following Russell Ivanovic's (one of the developers) blog. He has a couple of interesting posts on screen sizes.

His position is that the various screen sizes aren't a big deal so long as there are relatively few different proportions. You can make different resolution objects that the operating system can select from and present appropriately.

Here's his chart of the various Android screen proportions.

Now who hasn't heard that varying screen sizes are more of a problem on Android than on iOS?

From his follow on blog post here's the equivalent chart for iOS.

Note that the iOS chart was done with guesses of the iPhone 6 screen sizes and the guessed size of the iPhone 6+ was incorrect.

You decide which would be easier to code for.

Drive Snapshot

I have been using two partial backup solutions: IBM's Tivoli Continuous Data Protection and CrashPlan. They are somewhat different. I use Tivoli on selected directories to 1) backup to a second internal drive and 2) replicate that backup to an encrypted external drive that I keep in my car. I use CrashPlan to backup those same selected directories across the Internet to an external drive at my mother's. Tivoli is a commercial product, $54 for a permanent license. I use the part of CrashPlan that is free. Tivoli and CrashPlan both maintain versions of files in their backups.

But I got to worrying that I still had a lot of low value data that was not backed up anywhere. My drives are internal 400GB and 1TB drives and a 2TB Drobo (first generation, USB 2.0 attached). So I bought a 5TB external drive to backup everything.

My son-in-law is using Carbonite. When he had an internal drive fail recently he did a Carbonite recovery over the Internet. It took several weeks and generated several calls from Comcast about bandwidth usage. Subsequently he is using PureSync (free for personal use) to synchronize his Drobo with his internal drive. This doesn't address the Internet recovery situation.

But I wanted something to create pretty much an image of my drives so I could not only restore specific files but restore an entire drive if I had a drive failure. And I didn't want it to go over the Internet, not just for security but for bandwidth and recovery time.

Here's a bunch of sources that I looked at along the way.

• http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forums/backup-imaging-disk-mgmt.97/
• https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-commercial-disk-imaging-software-features-and-backuprestore-speed-comparison/2/
• http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/mastering-windows-8s-backuprestore-system/
• http://www.maximumpc.com/hard_drive_cloning_software_2014?page=0,0
• http://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/drive-snap-for-drive-snapshot.368010/ (wrapper for Drive Snapshot)

For the moment I'm testing Drive Snapshot. It is a commercial product (€39) with a 30-day trial. Unlike PureSync it doesn't require an install on the source system so I loaded the executable on the 5TB external drive. It takes compressed image backups. It takes differentials rather than incremental backups. It also has the ability to mount the backup file as a virtual drive which you can then access using Windows Explorer. It will do its own encryption but I'm a big fan of TrueCrypt so I'm just backing up to an encrypted volume.

I told Drive Snapshot to back up all of my volumes including the Drobo. It has to run as an administrator. It uses Windows Volume Snapshot Service to let you continue to operate while it's running.

Drive	Usage	Backup Time	Verify Time	In Use	Compressed
C	Boot	26:29	22:55	74.547MB	30.425MB
D	Data	463:51	344:50	572.508MB	559.835MB
E	Backup	141:09	126:18	224.437MB	207.060MB
I	Drobo	1223:26	1058:16	1.723GB	1.474GB
R	Restore	46:30	7:33	12.461MB	11.499MB

The times are in minutes. The Drobo took almost a day each for backup and verify. I believe that this is amplified greatly by the USB 2.0 interface. The Data drive and the Drobo are heavily JPEG and MPEG so they don't compress very well.

This is the Drive Snapshot log.

16:42:08 Disks in backup:
16:42:08 HD1:1 -> S:\HD1-1.sna
16:42:08 c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.SNA
16:42:08 d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.SNA
16:42:08 e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.SNA
16:42:08 i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.SNA
16:42:08 r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.SNA
16:42:08 Preparing for backup
16:42:09 More than one disk in Backup, using VSS
16:42:09 Starting Snapshot creation
16:42:09 Creating shadow set {39e244a3-b75c-437d-abd6-d733b0e47110}
16:45:14 Register shadow copy {d3fda85e-198d-4eb5-acf7-6d32041c6c68}
16:45:14 Register shadow copy {646d142d-abbb-4b8b-88d1-367cf44beb28}
16:45:14 Register shadow copy {6499449b-0677-4ef0-ba3b-e8963be52ab6}
16:45:14 Register shadow copy {0dc8b0ab-c3e9-46eb-b0b7-e696dbb129f7}
16:45:14 Register shadow copy {ad35a58a-58d9-4b31-b122-07aa5e6ba58c}
16:45:15 The Volume Snapshot was created successfully
16:45:31 Start backup of HD1:1 -> S:\HD1-1.sna
16:45:32 free space info: total 102.396KB, 76.696KB free, 25.700KB must be saved
16:45:32 HD1:1 -> S:\HD1-1.sna
16:45:32 HD1:1 25.700KB in use - stored in 9.380KB - 0:02 minutes
16:45:32 Success
16:45:32 Start verification of: S:\HD1-1.sna
16:45:33 Success!
16:45:33 Start VSS backup of c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.SNA
16:45:34 free space info: total 204.699MB, 130.152MB free, 51.203MB must be saved
16:45:49 c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.SNA
16:47:03 c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.sn1
...
17:10:12 c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.s19
17:11:24 c: -> S:\C-2015-01-26.s20
17:12:03 c: 74.547MB in use - stored in 30.425MB - 26:29 minutes
17:12:03 Success
17:12:03 Start verification of: S:\C-2015-01-26.SNA
17:34:58 Success!
17:36:07 Start VSS backup of d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.SNA
17:36:14 free space info: total 734.922MB, 162.414MB free, 569.508MB must be saved
17:40:15 d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.SNA
17:41:39 d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.sn1
...
01:15:20 d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.374
01:16:49 d: -> S:\D-2015-01-26.375
01:18:51 d: 572.508MB in use - stored in 559.835MB - 463:51 minutes
01:18:51 Success
01:18:51 Start verification of: S:\D-2015-01-26.SNA
07:03:41 Success!
07:05:51 Start VSS backup of e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.SNA
07:05:57 free space info: total 381.551MB, 157.114MB free, 221.437MB must be saved
07:06:44 e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.SNA
07:07:45 e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.sn1
...
09:21:53 e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.137
09:22:51 e: -> S:\E-2015-01-26.138
09:24:52 e: 224.437MB in use - stored in 207.060MB - 141:09 minutes
09:24:52 Success
09:24:52 Start verification of: S:\E-2015-01-26.SNA
11:31:10 Success!
11:31:43 Start VSS backup of i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.SNA
11:33:31 free space info: total 8.191GB, 6.468GB free, 1.720GB must be saved
11:39:35 i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.SNA
11:40:41 i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.sn1
...
07:47:24 i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.1012
07:48:28 i: -> S:\I-2015-01-26.1013
07:54:38 i: 1.723GB in use - stored in 1.474GB - 1223:26 minutes
07:54:38 Success
07:54:38 Start verification of: S:\I-2015-01-26.SNA
01:32:54 Success!
01:36:24 Start VSS backup of r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.SNA
01:37:45 free space info: total 14.143MB, 1.681MB free, 12.141MB must be saved
01:37:54 r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.SNA
02:03:26 r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.sn1
..
02:17:28 r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.sn6
02:18:28 r: -> S:\R-2015-01-26.sn7
02:19:37 r: 12.461MB in use - stored in 11.499MB - 46:30 minutes
02:19:37 Success
02:19:37 Start verification of: S:\R-2015-01-26.SNA
02:27:10 Success!
02:27:11 Deleting previously generated shadow copy
02:27:26 Unregister shadow copy {d3fda85e-198d-4eb5-acf7-6d32041c6c68}
02:27:35 Unregister shadow copy {646d142d-abbb-4b8b-88d1-367cf44beb28}
02:27:37 Unregister shadow copy {6499449b-0677-4ef0-ba3b-e8963be52ab6}
02:27:39 Unregister shadow copy {0dc8b0ab-c3e9-46eb-b0b7-e696dbb129f7}
02:27:40 Unregister shadow copy {ad35a58a-58d9-4b31-b122-07aa5e6ba58c}

The full backups of all my data used about 1/2 of the 5TB drive. My plan is to take monthly differential backups. I should be able to take several of them before I will need to do another full backup.

The direct impact on the system was minimal. I saw Drive Snapshot up around 500MB of RAM and nominal CPU. Most of the time it was using less resources than CrashPlan.

However during the backup the system was very sluggish. Physical Memory hovered just below 100% of 8GB. It never wouldn't respond but was just really slow. This wasn't a problem for me as no one actually sits in front of that system. It cleared up after the backups completed. I think this memory usage was caused by the VSSs.

Time will tell.

Update: Differential Backups

After a month I had Drive Snapshot run a differential backup.

Drive	Usage	Backup Time	Verify Time	In Use	Compressed
C	Boot	22:01	2:45	74.934MB	4.144MB
D	Data	227:38	11:31	624.13MB	74.207MB
E	Backup	67:46	4:34	227.724MB	7.774MB
I	Drobo	1289:42	297:58	1.788GB	419.130MB
R	Restore	8:13	0:00	12.461MB	1.700MB

Generally the backup times are consistent with the initial backup. However the verify times are greatly reduced in line with the amount of changed data. Similarly the smaller compressed sizes are representative of amount of changed data. As expected the big change was on the Drobo. I had cleaned up a lot of data on it but added a lot of new data.

This is the Drive Snapshot log.

09:01:49 Preparing for backup
09:02:30 More than one disk in Backup, using VSS
09:02:30 Starting Snapshot creation
09:02:30 Creating shadow set {ec62783d-15d6-47ec-bb8b-ec6030845c26}
09:11:06 Register shadow copy {3a1957d6-e0a8-4d42-b7d8-b603fcb050f2}
09:11:06 Register shadow copy {214b2e72-25e4-435a-99ac-7dac07088515}
09:11:06 Register shadow copy {fbc66051-e1f1-42ec-b439-56b134f94b83}
09:11:06 Register shadow copy {33214159-e83c-44be-99c2-5b94fad0c447}
09:11:06 Register shadow copy {44ab91de-7ade-4d0e-aaff-6c692aae236c}
09:11:06 The Volume Snapshot was created successfully
09:11:13 Start differential VSS backup of c: -> S:\C-2015-03-02.SNA
09:11:15 free space info: total 204.699MB, 129.765MB free, 50.946MB must be saved
09:11:16 c: -> S:\C-2015-03-02.SNA
09:27:20 c: -> S:\C-2015-03-02.sn1
09:30:47 c: -> S:\C-2015-03-02.sn2
09:33:10 c: 74.934MB in use - stored in 4.144MB - 22:01 minutes
09:33:10 Success
09:33:10 Start verification of: S:\C-2015-03-02.SNA
09:35:55 Success!
09:37:12 Start differential VSS backup of d: -> S:\D-2015-03-02.SNA
09:37:19 free space info: total 734.922MB, 110.786MB free, 621.136MB must be saved
09:37:19 d: -> S:\D-2015-03-02.SNA
11:14:53 d: -> S:\D-2015-03-02.sn1
...
13:23:03 d: -> S:\D-2015-03-02.s48
13:24:02 d: -> S:\D-2015-03-02.s49
13:24:49 d: 624.136MB in use - stored in 74.208MB - 227:38 minutes
13:24:49 Success
13:24:49 Start verification of: S:\D-2015-03-02.SNA
14:12:20 Success!
14:13:15 Start differential VSS backup of e: -> S:\E-2015-03-02.SNA
14:13:18 free space info: total 381.551MB, 153.827MB free, 224.724MB must be saved
14:13:18 e: -> S:\E-2015-03-02.SNA
14:49:48 e: -> S:\E-2015-03-02.sn1
...
14:58:58 e: -> S:\E-2015-03-02.sn4
15:11:24 e: -> S:\E-2015-03-02.sn5
15:20:37 e: 227.724MB in use - stored in 7.774MB - 67:46 minutes
15:20:37 Success
15:20:37 Start verification of: S:\E-2015-03-02.SNA
15:25:11 Success!
15:29:06 Start differential VSS backup of i: -> S:\I-2015-03-02.SNA
15:31:01 free space info: total 8.191GB, 6.403GB free, 1.785GB must be saved
15:31:05 i: -> S:\I-2015-03-02.SNA
05:38:31 i: -> S:\I-2015-03-02.sn1
...
12:55:47 i: -> S:\I-2015-03-02.280
12:57:49 i: -> S:\I-2015-03-02.281
12:58:41 i: 1.788GB in use - stored in 419.130MB - 1289:42 minutes
12:58:41 Success
12:58:41 Start verification of: S:\I-2015-03-02.SNA
17:46:39 Success!
17:47:06 Start differential VSS backup of r: -> S:\R-2015-03-02.SNA
17:47:08 free space info: total 14.143MB, 1.681MB free, 12.141MB must be saved
17:47:08 r: -> S:\R-2015-03-02.SNA
17:54:58 r: 12.461MB in use - stored in 1.700KB - 8:13 minutes
17:54:58 Success
17:54:58 Start verification of: S:\R-2015-03-02.SNA
17:54:58 Success!
17:54:58 Deleting previously generated shadow copy
17:55:00 Unregister shadow copy {3a1957d6-e0a8-4d42-b7d8-b603fcb050f2}
17:55:06 Unregister shadow copy {214b2e72-25e4-435a-99ac-7dac07088515}
17:55:07 Unregister shadow copy {fbc66051-e1f1-42ec-b439-56b134f94b83}
17:55:08 Unregister shadow copy {33214159-e83c-44be-99c2-5b94fad0c447}
17:55:09 Unregister shadow copy {44ab91de-7ade-4d0e-aaff-6c692aae236c}

The differential backups used about 500GB. Looks like I can keep a couple of months of differential backups at a time and only do a full backup annually or semi-annually.

I think Drive Snapshot is a keeper.

GPT Drobo

I've been a Drobo fan since 2007. My original Drobo is soldiering along just fine.

It has grown from 371GB protected to 1.8TB protected. But storage demands are growing by leaps and bounds.

I had setup the original Drobo as a MBR (Master Boot Record) volume so it was limited to 2TB. And the original Drobo only supports up to 2TB drives.

So I had a problem.

GPT (GUID Partition Table) addresses the volume size and is supported by Windows 7. GPT supports up to  9.4ZB which should last me a while.

With 4 2TB drives the original Drobo will give 5.44TB protected.

I inherited another original Drobo and started building it up with GPT and big drives.

Initially I provisioned it with 3 1TB drives giving the same 1.81TB as my old Drobo.

Then I copied the data from the old Drobo to the new Drobo. That took a couple of days as it uses USB 2.0.

When the copy completed I checked the size and number of files copied and they were fine.

I plugged the new Drobo into another system and renamed the volume to the same as the old Drobo. I shut down SERVER and switched Drobos. After the boot I had to reassign the drive letter and correct sharing and permissions.

All was fine until I rebooted SERVER. Then I got "INVALID PARTITION TABLE." Clearly it was related to the new Drobo so I rebooted and chose the boot option to select the boot device. I chose the boot drive and up it came.

It appears that the original Drobo misrepresents itself to the BIOS early on as a floppy drive. In the BIOS boot search I still had floppies as the first entry even though I don't have a floppy. I removed this entry and the boot problem went away.

What's next? More space. What else?

After a week or two I'm going to reclaim one of the 1TB drives from the old Drobo and put it in the new Drobo.

This will give me 2.72TB of protected space, an increase of 910GB from the old Drobo.

The second next step is to replace a pair of the 1TB drives with 2TB drives.

This will give me 3.63TB of protected space. That'll have to wait until the price of 2TB drives comes down.

Update: When I added the additional 1TB drive one of the older 1TB drives failed. The Drobo did it's magic and seamlessly rebuilt redundancy with the new 1TB drive. This drove me to accelerate the swap to 2TB drives. My goal now is to stay far enough ahead of my capacity requirement that the failure of a single drive won't cause me to lose redundancy.

More on Internet Bandwidth

I've discussed Internet bandwidth before. Here I go again.

I've got to lay a little groundwork. My son-in-law uses Carbonite for backup. It's rock solid and they like the ability to view their photos using the Carbonite iPhone app.

I've been using CrashPlan with my own offsite storage. Then mid-December 2014 CrashPlan offered a promotional price on their online backup service and I picked that up.

Here's what it did to my bandwidth.

That sudden drop on Christmas Eve wasn't a Christmas present. That's when I realized I was going to blow by the Comcast 300GB bandwidth cap. I managed it pretty well coming in at 297GB for the month of December.

I turned CrashPlan's bandwidth usage back up in January.

So that's one side of the issue.

The other side is restoring over the Internet. My son-in-law had a hard drive crash and initiated a restore using Carbonite. Here's what his bandwidth usage did.

That's what 1.5TB of Comcast bandwidth looks like. And yes he got a call from Comcast.

And it took more than a month to complete the restore.

Incidentally it looks like Carbonite is resending the restored data back to their servers effectively doubling the bandwidth usage.

And recently my granddaughter spent the night with us. She's addicted to a children's show carried by Netflix. Can you guess what time she woke up?

Almost 10GB in under 4 hours!

That's a day's worth of my Comcast cap.

Again a non-trivial upload bandwidth, almost 20%. Odd.

Remember my forecast in June 2014:

3. I can already see Comcast's bandwidth cap of 300GB looming in my future.

We are there.

Here's a post by one of my Facebook friends and my response.

I'll follow-up on my backup alternative in a later post.

Google and Gander

Remember the old saying "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Here's a good example.

Google's Project Zero publicly discloses flaws 90 days after it reports them to vendors. On January 11, 2015, Google disclosed a Windows 8.1 vulnerability. The problem was that Microsoft had committed to Google to fix it on January 13. Even without the fix potential attackers would "need to have valid logon credentials and be able to log on locally to a targeted machine."

At the same time it was discovered that Google was no longer fixing problems in the AOSP Internet browser in Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) released July 24, 2013. When a security researcher notified Google of problems in the browser in the fall of 2014 he was told "we generally do not develop the patches ourselves but do notify partners of the issue." This affects 60 per cent of Android's active user base.

Don't hold your breath on getting a fix from Verizon or AT&T.

Incidentally, Microsoft supported Windows XP (released in 2001) until 2014.

Shame on you Google.

"And now the rest of the story."

Google is between a rock and a hard place on patching the AOSP browser. Let's say that they did patch it. It then would be up to the various vendors to incorporate that level of Android into their proprietary additions/changes to Android and then push it out the 900 million devices. Realistically the vendors won't do that. They'd much rather sell you a new phone.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like too much for Google to patch the AOSP code and lay the blame for not updating the devices off on the vendors.

Update: Google blinked.

Enterprise Cloud Providers

As you know, I'm a big follower of cloud technology. Early this year I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal.

In this article the WSJ reported on a recent survey by Piper Jaffray of 112 CIOs. Piper Jaffray asked the CIOs to name their preferred public cloud provider.

Amazon Web Services led the responses with a 2 percentage point increase from 33% to 35%. Microsoft's Azure increased from 20% to 21%. IBM Softlayer had the biggest gain increasing from 4% to 6%.

The big loser was Google falling from 12% to 7%.

Reminds me of the old saying that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM." Or Microsoft.

There's an interesting comparison of Amazon and Microsoft's cloud offerings here.

Google Keep

My quest for the perfect grocery list continues. I've been using I Sync Tasks as described here. The author has been very responsive and the service updates the shared lists in about 60 seconds. It costs $1 per person per month.

In November Google updated it's Keep service with sharing. It syncs in real time for free. I lke the price.

There are good clients for the web and Android. iOS is notable by its absence.

Certainly Google will come out with an iOS client but in the mean time I started searching. I came across an article on GuidingTech. It referenced TurboNote for iOS and GoKeep for iOS.

When I tested TurboNote for iOS it would never complete logging in as others have noted in the reviews. It hasn't been updated since June 2014 so I'd avoid it.

GoKeep for iOS fared much better. The reviews that suggest that this is just the web presentation aren't completely correct. The body of the app is the web presentation but it is "wrapped." There are additional functions in the wrapping including an online/offline toggle and a slide-in bar on the left. This is where you can enable the zoom capability. Some reviews note that you aren't able to delete a note. This is because the note deletion function is in the drop-down of the "..." at the bottom of a note. As some other reviews mention this drop-down menu just blinks and goes away.

I found that it was easier to use the Google Keep web site on a non-iOS browser to set the various options and then use the iOS app.

GoKeep for iOS was updated late Novermber 2014.

To get a feel for GoKeep for iOS browse to http://keep.google.com in Safari. Incidentally the "..." drop-down doesn't work there either. If that looks good then install the free version. The paid version for $1.99 is actually a separate app so you'll want to uninstall the free version and then install the paid version.

There are still some downsides to Google Keep. I used the Google Tasks ability to have subordinate list items. Google Keep doesn't support this. I also used the "widget" capability of Google Tasks to present the list on the Google Mail and Google Calendar web pages. Hopefully Google will bring these capabilities to Google Keep in the future.