Well, it’s getting close to that time to re-evaluate backups as I think my $2.50/month backup plan is going away in July.
So far, there’s a few things I’ve looked at, but interested in what others are thinking (if anyone even reads this anymore).
Some background – in CrashPlan my backup set is currently 1.3TB. However, a lot of that is versions.
Well, I’m doing it (migrating my CrashPlan account – see previous post with updates)! This is primarily because I get the feeling the discount will disappear at the end of the month when they officially stop supporting home. For those that haven’t gone through the steps, just taking screenshots as an FYI. Additionally check out the other post as to how I’m managing non-NAS backups.
The UI when you log into your account (same user/pass) is now way different/better than the home one. Plus I get some of my storage back on my NAS due to it deleting computer-to-computer backups.
Boo, just got the email today that CrashPlan is leaving the home market. After I don’t know how many years, it looks like I’ll have to find another provider. It looks like there are a few, but with no computer-to-computer options baked in all will be a step back. *sigh*
**Update 8/23/2017**
I’ve been following a lot of different threads on this. Sadly, there are no direct competitors. Turns out CrashPlan (even with the crappy Java app) was the best for a lot of reasons including the following:
Total sidebar, but speaking of crappy Java apps, I had just migrated to using a docker image of CrashPlan too due the continued pain of updating it with Patter’s awesome SPK. Yay to running everything in docker now instead of native Synology apps.
My current setup consists of 3 Windows machines and a Synology NAS. I had the CrashPlan family account so each of those machines would sync to the cloud, and all the windows machines would sync to the NAS. Nothing crazy, and yes, I know I was missing a 3rd location for NAS storage for those following the 3-2-1 method.
The other cloud options I’ve looked at so far:
So where does that leave me? I’m hopefully optimistic about companies getting more feature parity, and thankfully my subscription doesn’t expire until July of 2018. Therefore, while I’m doing some work, I’m firmly in the “wait and see” camp at this point. However, if I were to move right now, this is what my setup would look like:
Hopefully this helps others, and I’ll keep updating this post based on what I see/move towards. Feel free to add your ideas into the comments too.
Just saw this announcement from MSFT. Could be an interesting archival strategy if tools start to utilize it – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-public-preview-of-azure-archive-blob-storage-and-blob-level-tiering/
**Update 10/11/2017**
A quick update on some things that have changed. I’ve moved away from Comcast, and now have Fiber! That means, no more caps (and 1Gbps speeds), so I’m more confident to go with my ideas above. So far this is what I’ve done:
CrashPlan’s Windows Exclusions – based on Java Regex
.*/(?:42|\d{8,}).*/(?:cp|~).*
(?i).*/CrashPlan.*/(?:cache|log|conf|manifest|upgrade)/.*
.*\.part
.*/iPhoto Library/iPod Photo Cache/.*
.*\.cprestoretmp.*
.*/Music/Subscription/.*
(?i).*/Google/Chrome/.*cache.*
(?i).*/Mozilla/Firefox/.*cache.*
.*/Google/Chrome/Safe Browsing.*
.*/(cookies|permissions).sqllite(-.{3})?
.*\$RECYCLE\.BIN/.*
.*/System Volume Information/.*
.*/RECYCLER/.*
.*/I386.*
.*/pagefile.sys
.*/MSOCache.*
.*UsrClass\.dat\.LOG
.*UsrClass\.dat
.*/Temporary Internet Files/.*
(?i).*/ntuser.dat.*
.*/Local Settings/Temp.*
.*/AppData/Local/Temp.*
.*/AppData/Temp.*
.*/Windows/Temp.*
(?i).*/Microsoft.*/Windows/.*\.log
.*/Microsoft.*/Windows/Cookies.*
.*/Microsoft.*/RecoveryStore.*
(?i).:/Config\\.Msi.*
(?i).*\\.rbf
.*/Windows/Installer.*
.*/Application Data/Application Data.*
(?i).:/Config\.Msi.*
(?i).*\.rbf
(?i).*/Microsoft.*/Windows/.*\.edb
(?i).*/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/Cookies(-journal)?", "(?i).*/Safari/Library/Caches/.*
.*\.tmp
.*\.tmp/.*
Yes, this is my world now, but in an effort to help others not waste time like I did…
If you are creating an INDEX MATCH formula in excel to do a multi-conditional VLOOKUP, Do NOT use tables or table columns. If you do use them you will #N/A results. For whatever reason it only works with non-table arrays.
And there goes 2 hours of my life I will never get back.
*EDIT 5/15/2017*
Well, I was running Index(Match) for awhile, but my-oh-my is it a painful query. Instead, for what I was doing, it’s just easier and faster to concatenate and vlookup.
Well, that was easy! Lets Encrypt is pretty awesome, and just setup some permanent redirects along with HSTS.
Well, as my Azure credits will surely run out sometime soon from my MSDN account, I needed to find new hosting. After a lot of searching for the right place, my new home is at TMD Hosting.
I didn’t want a full host to manage, and reading the reviews these are some of the best. The import took a bit longer than anticipated (issues with the Softaculous script), but so far so good!
Next steps are to enable HTTPS via Lets Encrypt.
Because you can (but you probably don’t want to). Party!
This was from when RemoteApp didn’t support creating an image directly from VM.
Copying files into a VM via the two commands is very CPU intensive due to the threading it uses, so utilize a larger box no matter your method. And the hands down winner is to use Azcopy into the local temp D:\ (avoids an extra storage account hop). However, if you want a status bar, utilize save-azurevhd.
Due to a storage cluster issue in AU East, it has been advised to create new storage accounts and migrate VHDs to the new storage accounts. MSFT had provided us with a script, but it was taking hours/days to copy (and kept timing out).
Instead, we spun up a D4v2 machine in the AU East region, and I was able to have 6 azcopy sessions happening all at once with the /SyncCopy command. Each was running >100MB/sec whereas other async methods were running at <5MB/sec. You will see a ton of CPU utilzation during this, but the faster the machine, the better. Additionally, azcopy supports resume. To allow multiple instances of azcopy to run on a machine, utilize the /Z:<folderpath> switch for the journal file.
Prior to getting all our copies going with the /SyncCopy, we had a few that were running async. Unfortunately, after stopping that with a CTRL-C and having azcopy stop, the blobs still had a copy pending action on them. This resulted in errors when attempting to re-run the copy with /SyncCopy on a separate machine: HTTP error 409, copy pending.
To fix this, you can force stop the copy. As these were new storage accounts with only these VHDs, we were able to run it against the full container. However, MSFT has an article on how you can do it against individual blobs.
Set-AzureStubscription -SubscriptionName <name> - CurrentStorageAccount <affectedStorageAccount> Get-AzureStorageBlob -Container <containerName> | Stop-AzureStorageBlobCopy -Force
As I was migrating my websites to a new host (I may blog about that later as it’s been an interesting ride), I had this lovely issue where one of my websites would go into an infinite redirect loop when sitting behind the Azure CDN (custom origin).
Of course, it worked fine for all pages except for the root. And it also worked fine when it wasn’t behind the Azure CDN. For whatever reason, adding a bit of code to the functions.php theme seemed to work.
remove_filter('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
I then had to add in a manual redirect in nginx via the below. Still no idea why it doesn’t just “work” as it has before, but whatever. Now that it’s working, I should go back and figure out why it wasn’t with redirect_canonical…
server {
listen 80;
server_name test.com;
rewrite ^ $scheme://www.test.com$request_uri? permanent;
}
Last night my SP3 decided to stop working with any Touch covers. They would work on other SP3s, just not this one. It definitely made work a lot of fun today.
Anyways, there is a “button reset” procedure that has worked in the past when it wouldn’t start. Turns out, it solved this problem too.