Category: caution to the wind?

Continued on backup strategies at home

This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….

OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.

Well shit…

Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.

I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.

I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.

This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.

Then I had a thought….

Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….

So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.

On backup strategies for the home…

On backup strategies for the home…

So I had a thought this evening as I was looking at my router and seeing my upload tick across the megabytes while my Crash Plan was syncing to it’s cloud backup.

Do I really need to be doing whole user directory backups to the cloud?

It was a moment of reflection, I had installed crash plan on the new Mac last year because, well that is what I always have done since 2010 when I started with Carbonite. Yes, I had Time Machine… but after the great flower fire of 2010, I had been running a dual onsite / offsite backup strategy. A little belt and suspenders for home, but practice what you preach to the people at work. Fast forward seven years and my two major reasons for doing a multi backup strategy have pretty much gone by the way side.

  1. DEAR LORD I’M THE ONLY PERSON WITH COPIES OF XYZ PICTURE… because I’m a bit of a data hoarder, and apparently no one else in my family can be bothered to learn how to use FLICKR.
  2. Cloud syncing technology is pretty seamless now for user folders.

The first problem is pretty much taken care of by the fact that every photo I take is synced to three different services pretty much automatically off of my phone or main machine within 24 hours. So no issues with losing those pictures that appear to be only backed up by me. The second one wasn’t as in your face and really didn’t hit me till the last two weeks or so.

I signed up to start taking some classes and working towards a masters (that’ s a separate blog post when I feel like talking about it). Anyway the school uses Office 365 which I subscribe to on a personal level already. My entire workspace is through the Office 365 portal on the schools website, which I thought was pretty cool. Until I signed into my personal copy at home with my school credentials and had a second instance of OneDrive sync start up. Thats when it dawned on me, I’ve been on OneDrive for a couple of years now and could lose my computer tomorrow. I wouldn’t care everything I need is up in my OneDrive… it just took a few years for that particular wall to fall.

So now as I sit here looking at my Crash Plan app I’m wondering to myself, do I actually need to continue to pay for a service that while it does provide a complete copy of all my files and 30 days of deleted files…. it’s slow as hell doing a restore and kinda cumbersome for anything more then a folder or two. Also my /User/tom folder on my Mac is 86GB after documents, pictures, music, and some video, but before any of my Virtual Machines.

So that’s something to talk about there, what about Virtual Machines or larger databases you may have on your local machine. Well for me, I use rsync for the VM files themselves to be synced to my home server. After that I really don’t care, I don’t run anything production on the VM’s they are there specifically to play with and blow away as needed. The Windows VM machines are a little bit more temperamental then Linux for me, but that’s because I get annoyed that I have to license my Windows machines versus just popping a new Linux flavor.

So at the end of the day, the question is for me is there a good reason to keep paying for Crash Plan or something of it’s ilk? I honestly don’t know, in just the writing of this post I’ve gone through a fair amount of type space that says maybe not.

Things to chew on.

On beer brewing and being frugal

In the year 2007 I had a pretty good June, I sold my first house… paid off a bunch of bills accumulated because I was selling a house…. bought my first MAC…. and bought my first home brew kit.

One of those three items is still with me today… go ahead guess… I’ll wait.

Jeopardy Theme plays in background

If you guessed the MAC, you would be close but after 5 years the old laptop couldn’t keep up. Almost all of that first beer brewing kit is still with me and still used in some shape or form. The only casualty has been a glass carboy that cracked when cleaning. For 10 years to still be using most all of the stuff is pretty impressive in my world. Which now 10 years on I’m to a point where I want to step up my brewing operations by don’t want to piecemeal the deal.

So here is the outline of what will become the brew setup 2.0

  • Overall the system will use a “HERMS” process https://youtu.be/PNKcQoGZOpQ though mine won’t be nearly that fancy.
  • Hot liquor heating will come from a second propane stove I have
  • One pump for the entire setup which means I’ll be moving hoses
  • which means quick connects for hoses
  • And I need to get a counter flow chiller

I do have a diagram someplace in one of my cloud drives, but it is not ready for prime time.

So in the mean time… I keep plotting and planning.

Batch #3… Dead Rouge Honey Ale

The Dead Rouge Ale kit is in the carboy and fermentation is under way. I did a adjunct of 7 or 8 ounces of Mesquite honey from Flagstaff. I added the hone in the last 10 minutes of the boil at the same time as the aroma hops.

I’m interested to see how the beer turns out, I didn’t pull back on any of the malt or candy I don’t think it will be a overly sweet beer. You never know with home brew though that’s part of the joy.

Also brewing in the backyard worked much better then brewing in the garage, more space and less cleanup after a boil over.

15 days in the carboy, and then the keg.

Tapping happens on the first monday night football game of the season.

Carbination baby…. it’s what makes beer go fizz

So with the latest batch of beer I have run into a unexpected problem…. To much carbination! So much in fact that when I pull a glass I have a glass full of foam rather then a glass full of mostly beer and some foam.

It’s a disturbing situation to say the least.

How does one remove over carb from a keg of beer? I haven’t quite gotten that one figured out yet. Right now I’m trying the remove the CO2 tank from the keg and releasing the pressure method. I’m going to give it a few days and see what I come up with.

I did have a similar problem with the last batch, but it was resolved by simply dialing back the pressure on the keg. This time that is not working nor is the cold glass trick. I’m not espcially worried about it since I’m not above dumping home brew and starting over.

Which I’m seriously starting to think about.

Though on the bright side Curtis did declare the beer “passable” which I think means if it’s the only thing to drink in the house I won’t bitch. John also declared “if this was cold it would be perfect”

At least I know people like my kit home brew… just wait until I start screwing with them when I do my own recipies 🙂

Batch #2 and other thoughts….

I kegged Batch #2 this evening… I don’t know how the fermentation took… there was about .25 of a inch of yeast on the bottom of the carboy…. I don’t know if this is because of the yeast I used or the beer. The last batch had almost 2 inches of yeast.

I also planned on posting more photos and cleaning guide.. I think that is going to wait until tommrow night.

Batch #2 – A fine Scotch Ale

OK so I wandered down to the homebrew store down the street and picked up another kit… this time it’s a scotch ale. This should be intersting since the closesest thing I’ve ever had to a scotch ale is a irish ale.

And in a very uncharacteristic turn I am almost totally ignoring the instructions that came with said kit and doing the entire thing as I’ve been taught… it’s either going to be a mess or it’s going to be ok.

And I just realized that I’m supposed to let the water get to 180 before I put the grains in… Oh well