How do you backup your photos?

Almost everyone these days take pictures with some form of digital photographic device whether it is your phone, digital camera or your own personal Drone . Unlike the old days when you had your negatives and  prints to fall back on today a cyber attack or drive failure can wipe out your entire photo library.

Suzy Pratt wrote an article for Digital Photography School discussing the methods you might consider in protecting your photographs. Rule of thumb for backups, have at least three copies (the original, and two backups) with the backups on different storage media and at least on copy of premise. Falling this basic rule will help to prevent the heartache of losing everything from either a hardware failure or from a dreaded cyber attack.

I have my photos backed up locally on two drives in my computer, a USB drive a take offsite and most of photos go up into the cloud to SmugMug for safekeeping as well as making them available to family and friends. I’d also love to hear from you about how you protect your digital memories.

ioSafe’s CEO Robb Moore on Discovery Channel

ioSafe is being featured on the Discovery Channel program Daily Planet. You can watch our CEO, Robb Moore, with the host burning, dousing with water, and even dropping our 1513 form 30 feet all in an effort to try and render the data useless. The data SURVIVED intact!  A video is worth a million words in this case! Here is the link to the video: http://www.discovery.ca/Video?vid=433556

Thinking about backing up your data? I have a few thoughts about that…

I try to put together a new overview discussing the why’s and howto’s of backing up your data. In this white paper I have listed a few of the methods to consider to use for backup and some of the services that we provide to help fit your needs and budget numbers. If you are interested, and we all should be, take a few minutes to download this paper. I think you will find it interesting and very informative. If you have any questions about the information I have listed or you want to pursue a personal design session please let us know and we will be happy to discuss your requirements and suggest the best backup design to fit your needs.

ioSafe releases larger data safes

The ioSafe 1513+ NAS can scale up to 90TB, has 4 LAN Ports with Link Aggregation and High Availability and solves a variety of business challenges for the enterprise, creative professionals and home users

Scalable NAS for growing demands

With its fire/water protection, superior performance, scalability, resilience, and comprehensive features, ioSafe® NAS 1513+ is the ideal storage solution for your growing business. The 1513+ can help to simplify disaster recovery, business continuity, data management, sharing storage for storage and backup - with minimal setup and the freedom to expand capacity at any time.

• Protects data from fire up to 1550°F, 30 minutes per ASTM E-119
• Protects data from floods up to 10 foot depth, 3 days, complete submersion
• 202.34 MB/sec Writing, 350.94MB/sec Reading
• Four LAN Ports with Link Aggregation Support
• Scale Up to 90TB with one or two ioSafe N513X Expansion Chassis
• Expandable RAM Module (Up to 4GB)
• CPU Passive Cooling Technology & System Fan Redundancy
• VMware®, Citrix®, Microsoft® Hyper-V® Ready
• High Availability and Automatic Failover between a pair of 1513+ systems
• Running Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM)

An Ideal Solution for:

• Medical Data Storage/HIPAA Compliance
• Collaborative File Sharing
• High Availability RTO/RPO
• SAN / Tier-2 Storage with low operating costs

How does it work?

The ioSafe 1513+ connects to your network, preferably at the main router or switch. A network drive (or "share") can be created that allows everyone on the local area network (LAN) with proper permissions to "see" the common drive and share the data. The data can also be made available to the wide area network (WAN - aka the Internet) by allow applications and data to be "forwarded" to the NAS at your router.

These are great products that we use for onsite backup solutions where there is too much data to effectively get it offsite. We typically use them with Veeam for our larger VMware installations.

IoSafe - SynLocker Ransomware Alert

An alert has gone out from IoSafe warning against a possible situation that could harm your IoSafe installations. Check to see if you have a unit that might be affected. An upgrade to their DSM software. See information below:

We would like to inform you that a ransomware called "SynoLocker" is currently affecting some ioSafe/Synology NAS users. This ransomware locks down affected servers, encrypts users’ files, and demands a fee to regain access to the encrypted files.

We have confirmed that the ransomware only affects ioSafe/Synology NAS servers running older versions of DiskStation Manager by exploiting a security vulnerability that was fixed and patched in December, 2013.

Affected users may encounter the following symptoms:

• When attempting to log in to DSM, a screen appears informing users that data has been encrypted and a fee is required to unlock data.
• Abnormally high CPU usage or a running process called “synosync” (which can be checked at Main Menu > Resource Monitor).
• DSM 4.3-3810 or earlier; DSM 4.2-3236 or earlier; DSM 4.1-2851 or earlier; DSM 4.0-2257 or earlier is installed, but the system says no updates are available at Control Panel > DSM Update.

If you have encountered the above symptoms, please shutdown the system immediately and contact our technical support here: https://myds.synology.com/support/support_form.php

If you have not encountered the above symptoms, we strongly recommend downloading and installing DSM 5.0, or any version below:

• DSM 4.3-3827 or later
• DSM 4.2-3243 or later
• DSM 4.0-2259 or later
• DSM 3.x or earlier is not affected

You can manually download the latest version from our Download Center and install it at Control Panel > DSM Update > Manual DSM Update.

If you notice any strange behavior or suspect your ioSafe/Synology NAS server has been affected by the above issue, please contact us at security@synology.com. We sincerely apologize for any problems or inconvenience this issue has caused our users. We’ll keep you updated with the latest information as we continue to address this issue.

VMware Horizon Mirage

Here’s a quick video on VMware’s Mirage product. Really looks interesting from an IT perspective in managing a large group of PC’s that have mostly the same setups on them. It allows you to separate the PC into logical layers and to keep backups of desktop images to enable quick recovery or rollback in case of failure.

Priced at $1,815/10 pack this is a relatively elegant method of ensuring uptime for your office workers on their machines.When you compare this cost to the downtime for your users and the support costs to bring them back up you can easily see the cost savings.

How can this product help you? Use it to speed up Window 7 Migrations, or to Simplify PC Backup and Desktop Recovery and easily Manage Remote and Branch Office PCs. If you have 10 or more machines then this product can be a big benefit for you.

• Download Datasheet
• Download FAQ
• Windows 7 Migration Solution Brief
• Horizon Mirage Reviewer's Guide
• VMware Horizon Mirage FAQ document

We are now a Carbonite Partner

I don’t know what took us so long but we are now able to setup and help you manage your cloud backup for home and business. Carbonite has five different plans to choose from. You should be able to find one of them that meets your needs. If you don’t need the more robust Gemini Backup Solution that we offer for your servers, this product should have the right plan at the right price for you to pick from.

The following is an overview of your choices:

Carbonite Home is $59 per year (per computer) with unlimited backup.

Carbonite HomePlus is $99 per year and provides unlimited backup for a single computer and USB attached external hard drive.

Carbonite HomePremier is $149 per year and provides unlimited backup for a single computer, USB attached external hard drive backup and courier recovery. Premium, feature-rich online backup for your computer and external hard drive.

Carbonite Business is $229 per year and comes with a base package of 250 GB of storage. This solution is intended to backup a distributed environment composed of multiple workstations, desktops or laptops. Carbonite Business is priced by the total storage need of the organization not the number of users/machines. Put another way the 250 GB could come from 5 workstations or 50 workstations and the price would not change. Carbonite Business does not support server operating systems.

Carbonite Business Premier is $599 per year for 500 GB of storage and is optimized for server backup. This is the solution you will deploy if you’re installing Carbonite on an actual server operating system. Carbonite Business is priced by the total storage need of the organization not the number of users/machines. Put another way the 500 GB could come from 1 server, 5 servers or 1 server/20 computers and the price would not change.

So there is no excuse now to get yourself setup with the right backup solution now!

Cloud Storage - How are you using it

There are many products available to you that allow you to take advantage of either pay or free storage on the internet. To name a few that I use, Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud, Google Docs, SmugMug, Picasso, Flicker, Google Play, Amazon MP3…

How do you decide what to use for your situation? Let me pose a few questions that should help you make a decision. There will be a lot variables I’ll throw at you that may have you looking at several options to accomplish your end goals.

The first thing to consider about ‘Cloud Storage’ is to decide what the overall reason is for storing your files offsite. Are you contemplating this to make the files available to yourself and possibly others, on different devices and from different locations, or do you just want a backup?

Answer: If you’re looking for just a backup solution, you should be looking for an automated backup solution. We all have the best of intentions when we decide that we should be backing up but we all are so busy that eventually we lose sight of doing these in a timely basis. So you want to look for a service that is automated.

One of the best of these for a home environment is Carbonite. I have reported on this in previous posts and I would probably direct most people looking for this solution to go in this direction. For $59/year - $149/year, you can back up a single PC’s physical drives using their service with unlimited storage. They have three plans now for the Home PC owner. All three only support a single PC but you can upgrade your service to meet what your needs are. See this article to get more detail on Carbonite’s Service.

What I finally did for myself was to create a large drive array on my central workstation with multiple 1 TB drives using a hot swap drive cage that lets me play several different games. Since most of my storage is a combination of scanned documents (I’m trying to get as paperless as possible), photos and videos. My scanned docs do not take up much space, however, my photos and videos right now are closing in on 600GB. This is a massive amount of information and it would take a long time to move into the cloud using a backup service initially. Because I want instantaneous access to my image backups I do a more manual backup, but if you keep it local, you need to keep up a strict regimen to maintain a multiple site backup and keep it up to date, it is easy to become lazy so you must not allow yourself to become so.

I know that a lot of people also use a photo storage service as their method of backing up their images. If you are using a free service, look at how you would reacquire your files/images from that service. You may or may not be able to do so easily or at all. Those images may not be stored with their original information or resolution and this is not a good situation to be in. I use a service called SmugMug because it allows me to create galleries of the photos that I want to share, provide access to the images to download to friends and family to download and lets me create documentation to describe my insights about the images that I take. If I want a copy I can either download them, point at them for inclusion in one of my blog sights or have the service create a disk of the images and send it to me. Now I am paying for this service and there are a couple of different levels that you can get into. I chose the pro version to accommodate the larger videos that I seem to be taking more of. But even for the$100 annual expense I have unlimited capacity to push information there. This service solves two of my main concerns with an easy method of reacquiring my pictures, and having those shares available for my family.

This service does not handle my document storage needs though. There are several things I do to accommodate this. But again, it may be easier to use a storage service like Carbonite to do this for you.

The other thing that you can do is use a cloud based storage system that is available in both free and paid versions. I personally use Dropbox to share all of my current shared documents between my office, home and other devices. This allows me to easily move between the best devices to access the information that I am working with. This article is a good example for instance. I started when I was sitting at home using my iPad with CloudOn and continued in the office on my desktop. I stored the information to Dropbox and it was easy to move from system to system to be able to access the files I needed.

Here are some of the other locations that you can get cloud storage for free or paid as well:

Revisiting the Carbonite Backup Solution

It is about time that I present an updated review of the Carbonite system since I have been away from it for so long. They still don’t have what I would call a household plan that would allow you backup multiple machines in your home under an umbrella contract but they have extended their plans for the home owner to allow for three varying levels of support. You will need to decide after looking at this at which one best meets your needs.

All three versions have the following support:

• Quantity (1) Computer per Subscription can be backed up
• Both File and Folder backup
• You can access your files from an internet connection or a Smart Phone (Blackberry, Android or iPhone)
• Operating Support: Windows and Mac on the Home plan and Windows only on HomePlus and HomePremier packages
• Phone, chat and email support
• Video Backup (Home and HomePlus are manual and HomePremier allows you to automate it)

HomePlus and HomePremier add:

• External hard drive backup – Files and Folders from one external hard drive can be included in your online backup
• Mirror Image backup – This gives you the option of creating a copy of your entire drive to an external hard drive. You will need to provide that hard drive for the backup. This is something that you could perform using Windows 7 backup as well.

HomePremier has two other features

• Automatic Video Backup
• Courier Recovery Service – This gives you the option to have a copy of your backup shipped to you. If you have large amounts of data this could be a lifesaver if you have to restore a system. This is available in the U.S. only. They will charge you shipping for it.

This get you a little closer to being able to provide critical offsite backup to your home systems at a very reasonable price. $149/year for the HomePremier version to completely automate the process is great if you have a machine that also acts as central storage system. I have configured my home machine to have a three drive rack add-on that would allow me to share that area to the rest of the equipment on my home network and then run the Carbonite program on that machine to provide a solid backup scenario including backing up my video files.

Buffalo Ships the Revolutionary CloudStor Device

Looking for an easy solution to accessing your files located at home or at your office? A new product from Buffalo Technologies a leader in storage appliances that are both useful and affordable. Available in 1 and 2TB capacities this NAS storage device adds some cloud services to it for no extra cost.

Click to read more ...

Buffalo Introduces MiniStation HD-PCTU2 Series Portable Hard Drives

If you follow me at all you know that I have a penchant for making multiple copies of my data on multiple devices, locations and sources. Buffalo is coming out with a  new series of portal hard drives that will help you make backups and share your data between machines and locations.The HD-PCTU2 comes in piano black and pearl white colors, and capacities that include 320 GB, 500 GB, and 640 GB, priced at around $119, $149 and $200, respectively. Measuring 77 x 14 x 114 mm, the drives weigh 165 grams. USB 2.0 handles power and connectivity. The bundled EcoManager software cuts down power draw by 20%. These devices have a 1 year warranty.

I love the size of this type of drive and that it will draw it’s power from your USB port connection. That it has less of a power draw will make it a great choice as a mobile solution along with your mobile computer for backup or extending storage capabilities.

Are Solid State Drives Better Than Spinning Platter Based Drives?

This is a subject that we have been musing over quite a bit lately when talking to our clients and one that you will of course have to answer for yourself based on hopefully the information that I am about to give you. The two primary things that you need to consider are how much storage do you need and how much do you want to pay to decrease data access times.

Click to read more ...

Never Say You’re Sorry

You have all probably been in the situation where you have lost a file on your computer, either because you accidentally deleted it, had a system crash, virus attack or the super catastrophe, a drive failure. Recently, on my blog site, I had written about a virus that goes in and encrypts all your music, picture and document files so they disappear and if you try to run a virus removal program to fix the problem, it actually causes irreversible damage to those files so that they cannot be recovered. So if you are like me, and your work and family memories have all become digital… You need to start considering how you’re going to protect your digital treasures from permanent loss.

Click to read more ...

Do you need another reason to backup your data?

Brian Fine one of our in-house support technicians reported today, but this virus seems to have been around since at least Dec 2008. So it isn’t exactly new but its delivery is. It seems to have found the WIN Antivirus (virus) trojan and is now using it to jump onto your machine although we are not positive this is the case.

Click to read more ...

Buffalo Releases TeraStation Windows Storage Server

New TeraStation WSS (Press Release to Buffalo Partners)

Buffalo Releases TeraStation Windows Storage Server
Buffalo's new TeraStation Windows Storage Server offers dependability, seamless integration, and one of the best values in  networked storage.  Windows Storage Server provides businesses a solution that offers no compromise integration into Windows workgroup or domain environments.

The TeraStation WSS features Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 Express Edition and helps businesses store and protect their digital assets.  The TeraStation WSS is easy to install and manage, and offers the power of a Windows server operating system to provide a feature rich environment and easy to set up file sharing.  With seamless support for protocols such as SMB, NFS, AppleTalk, and Netware, The TeraStation WSS allows data to be shared among different platforms.  In addition, native integration with the Active Directory service provides simplified management for customers operating in a Windows domain environment.
Available in the following skus:
2.0TB   WS-Q2.0TL/R5
4.0TB   WS-Q4.0TL/R5

Tricks: How I worked around Mozy’s NAS device limitation

So the other day I went ahead and signed up for the MozyHome backup subscription, and when I began setting up what I wanted to have backed up I immediately found out that I was unable to back up any files are located on my NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.  Now, I use my NAS box has the central point where I store all of my shared files on my Home Network.  I have a USB drive attached two my NAS box that automatically backs up all of my files on this device, locally, but I also wanted to have offsite backup of these files as well.

My primary interest was in my digital photographs, I have never lost any pictures but I don't want to ever have to suffer that anguish.  So I was looking for simple way to work around this problem and I came up with setting up the scheduled task that runs xcopy with a few switches after it to make it functional and quick after the initial transfer.  Luckily, Mozy works with USB drives that are attached to your computer, and I currently have a 1 TB USB drive attached to my system that I haven't filled up yet so I setup a simple xcopy command that will back up any files that have not changed in my picture directory to my USB drive.  This also gives new one extra copy of my picture files locally as another backup.

xcopy L:\share\pictures\*.* e:\Pictures /d /s /v /c /j

Switch Definitions I used…

• /D:m-d-y     Copies files changed on or after the specified date. If no date is given, copies only those files whose source time is newer than the destination time.
• /S           Copies directories and subdirectories except empty ones.
• /V           Verifies the size of each new file.
• /C           Continues copying even if errors occur.
• /J           Copies using unbuffered I/O. Recommended for very large files.

XCopy command structure and full set of switches:

Copies files and directory trees.

XCOPY source [destination] [/A | /M] [/D[:date]] [/P] [/S [/E]] [/V] [/W]
                           [/C] [/I] [/Q] [/F] [/L] [/G] [/H] [/R] [/T] [/U]
                           [/K] [/N] [/O] [/X] [/Y] [/-Y] [/Z] [/B]
                           [/EXCLUDE:file1[+file2][+file3]...]

  source       Specifies the file(s) to copy.
  destination  Specifies the location and/or name of new files.
  /A           Copies only files with the archive attribute set,
               doesn't change the attribute.
  /M           Copies only files with the archive attribute set,
               turns off the archive attribute.
  /D:m-d-y     Copies files changed on or after the specified date.
               If no date is given, copies only those files whose
               source time is newer than the destination time.
  /EXCLUDE:file1[+file2][+file3]...
               Specifies a list of files containing strings.  Each string
               should be in a separate line in the files.  When any of the
               strings match any part of the absolute path of the file to be
               copied, that file will be excluded from being copied.  For
               example, specifying a string like \obj\ or .obj will exclude
               all files underneath the directory obj or all files with the
               .obj extension respectively.
  /P           Prompts you before creating each destination file.
  /S           Copies directories and subdirectories except empty ones.
  /E           Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones.
               Same as /S /E. May be used to modify /T.
  /V           Verifies the size of each new file.
  /W           Prompts you to press a key before copying.
  /C           Continues copying even if errors occur.
  /I           If destination does not exist and copying more than one file,
               assumes that destination must be a directory.
  /Q           Does not display file names while copying.
  /F           Displays full source and destination file names while copying.
  /L           Displays files that would be copied.
  /G           Allows the copying of encrypted files to destination that does
               not support encryption.
  /H           Copies hidden and system files also.
  /R           Overwrites read-only files.
  /T           Creates directory structure, but does not copy files. Does not
               include empty directories or subdirectories. /T /E includes
               empty directories and subdirectories.
  /U           Copies only files that already exist in destination.
  /K           Copies attributes. Normal Xcopy will reset read-only attributes.
  /N           Copies using the generated short names.
  /O           Copies file ownership and ACL information.
  /X           Copies file audit settings (implies /O).
  /Y           Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
               existing destination file.
  /-Y          Causes prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
               existing destination file.
  /Z           Copies networked files in restartable mode.
  /B           Copies the Symbolic Link itself versus the target of the link.
  /J           Copies using unbuffered I/O. Recommended for very large files.

The switch /Y may be preset in the COPYCMD environment variable.
This may be overridden with /-Y on the command line.

First impressions of my Flip HD Video Camera

Merry Christmas Everyone! It’s rainy and wet here today, Yuck!, but we still have a little snow to make it seem like Christmas. I want to start with the Flip camera.

I liked how easy the camera worked and the low light capabilities of the unit. One thing that I noticed though was how noisy 20 odd people can be when crowded into a small space. Because the camera is so light you don’t get tired holding it but you also don’t have the heft to help you steady it either. I tried putting together the pictures using the Flip Software but it seems cumbersome so I tried switching to Window’s Movie Maker. The sound track from the video seemed to shift some on that and I wasn’t real happy with that either. That bothers me because Movie maker is easy to use it would be nice if it would work for this purpose.

I need to give it another try but I miss my big machine. It got a little sick with of the stupidity of its primary operator. I had a Facebook message come through that pointed to a site that a virus/trojan attached and I went through the motions of loading the virus without thinking. Shouldn’t be operating a computer that early in the morning I guess. It really got zapped and the guys are still working on it. I hope we don’t have to reload the computer from scratch. This is not the time of year to be doing that.

My off loading the data to network drives will allow me to bring the system back up to speed rather quickly though if that is what we have to do. So if you run into an email that has you installing software onto your system, don’t do it. Delete, Delete DELETE! Even the best of us can get suckered.

Are you doing proper backups of your precious data?

  It is so important to do proper backups of you data but sometimes our best attempts fall short of what is necessary.

In the diagram to the left I have put together what I consider as the best configuration for protecting your data. First Remember that your data isn’t backed up unless it is saved in at least two places. If you move you data to your network storage and remove it off of you local drive then it is stored in just one place, on your network storage.  In the first drawing, I have the data being backed up to the NAS storage device that is connected to the router. Additionally, data would be stored to an online backup service to give you another redundant backup off-site. I will discuss some of your online storage options later.

In the second drawing, I have included a second backup source for your local network. There are several companies that make a NAS drive/USB Drive duo to allow a backup locally of this data. If you decide to go this direction, then the NAS device can be your primary storage area, which would make more sense if you have multiple computers in your home or small business environment. This allows for centralized storage and gives everyone access to your stored files.

Online backup services do differ. In a home environment you want to have a good source to back up to but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg. Mozy and Carbonite are priced very closely for the home consumer. Jungle Disk has more flexibility and can be more cost effective especially for someone that has multiple computers in multiple locations. There are no limitations from where you can backup from with Jungle Disk, they charge based on the amount of data that you are storing offline. Carbonite and Mozy have fixed costs for home users but Mozy charges a storage fee as well for commercial clients. Carbonite will only backup files on the computer that has the software installed on it. Mozy will let you backup from any drive source, network, shared or locally connected. If you are backing up with the software on different machines, you will need a license for each machine so it pays to put all your data on a central device and then have a single computer controlling the backup of that data.

	Pricing	Pros/Cons
Carbonite	$59.95 unlimited file storage	Least Expensive of the three we services that we are showing here. Won’t back up attached or network storage devices. Need a separate license for each machine you want to back up
Mozy	Mozy Home: $4.95 per license/workstation unlimited storage. Mozy Pro: ($3.95/Desktop, $6.95/Server plus $.50) /gb/month	Doesn’t have the individual file size limitation that Jungle Disk has. Can back up NAS and USB Attached Storage Devices. For larger storage needs this service can be more expensive for Mozy Pro (commercial) subscription. If you are storing 100GB’s from a single desktop you cost would be $53.95/month compared to Jungle Disk that would cost $17.25. Mozy would be my choice for home storage of if I have files that exceed 5gb’s in file size.
Jungle Disk	Personal Storage Simply Backup: $2/month includes 5GB free. $.15/gb/month for storage above 5GB’s. Personal Storage Desktop Edition: $3/month includes 5GB free. $.15/gb/month for storage above 5GB’s. Workgroup Storage: $4/user/month + storage fees. First 10GB free. Additional storage $.15/gb/month. Supports groups from 2-100 users. Server Edition Storage: $5/server/month + storage fees. First 10GB free. Additional storage $.15/gb/month.	If you have less than 25gb’s to store offsite the Simply Basic subscription is less expensive than Carbonite or Mozy. If you have multiple computers to backup use the Desktop Storage version. This will give you another network “CLOUD” drive that can be accessed by any of your computers that you have installed the software on. Workgroup Storage gives you the ability to limit what can be accessed by members of your group while providing centralized backup for all the members of your group. If you have people located in different places this gives everyone in the group easy central access through the internet of your data/documents. One big problem though is that files sizes that can be backed up are limited to 5gb’s per file. If you need or want the flexibility this service provides, this is the most cost effective method to store large file capacities from multiple systems and/or locations.