In this post, I offer to detail how to use EAC v1.6 (the most recent version while I wirte). First, to best configure it, then to use it fast with an efficient repeatititve but simple routine.

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) configuration to rip into FLAC

Before working, you need to first configure your EAC copy in order to reach a smooth operation mode. You’ll do this only once and it will stay put for all the rips afterwards. You can use the EAC “Configuration Wizard” (it’s easy to use at first), but I will go through option menus one after the other while highlighting a few critical aspects.

EAC > EAC Options…

I will prioritize quality over time in the “Error recovery quality”. After all, why use FLAC if the data is poorly recovered on old discs? High is for up to 5 batches of 16 re-reads.

The third selection is a time saver: You always want to have the metadata from the database.

Let’s avoid showing status at the end of extraction for the sake of time and efficiency (we don’t want to close another dialog box for each CD).

At the bottom, you can change the interface language, but I will keep English here.

The top two options are simply useless if your CD drive does not support reading UPC/ISRC codes. But it’s nothing to worry much about.

Depending on the use of your collection of rips, you may want to extract a .m3u playlist file. I don’t.

I am personnaly oppposed to normalizing sound (and it is quite dangerous to classical music) since it creates much damage to the low and high sounds that may be importnat on your music. Here we are generating quality lossless backups, not transforming the audio record.

The safer choice is “%tracknr2% %title%” but it’s your choice.

I prefer to store each rip in a separate directory…

EAC > Drive options…

Here, it may require a little technical experimenting.

The top part should have been auto-configured by the AccurateRip configuration. No need to change anything.

Here, CaptainRookie recommends method A, but I think method B is the most tolerant in case of some CDs with very long gaps.

EAC > Compression Options…

Here we come to the heart of things: We want to produce FLAC files from your audio CDs as fast and as efficiently as possible.

All external “FLAC compression” program options have been provided by CaptainRookie. They are safe to use and efficicent. I auto-decreased slightly the bit rate but it seems to be without any observable impact.

“Delete WAV after compression” will remove useless intermediate files.

I strongly recommend to always use the “Test encoder” button before moving to the next tab.

So, nothing original in the last tabs.

EAC > Metadata Options…

I recommend using the simplest opton for metadata: Freedb. even if you may have to open a free account on their web site.

You may have to provide your own free authentication data.

I choose not to enable the last option, but you may want it to keep working even in th event of a server error. I prefer more visibility/transparency; It’s up to you.

How to use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to rip a CD-A into FLAC?

Now, is the time to start your own personal ripping routine. Nothing original, nothing really hard, not instantaneous, but deeply satisfying and efficient. I apprecaite that this can be done from the keyboard, which is more reproducible.

Open exact Audio Copy (EAC) from Windows, and insert a CD. EAC will start reading the CD, then connect to FreeDB in order to collect the metadata.

It is time for you to check the metadata (track names, album and artist names, etc.) You can immediately make needed corrections.

If this is the first time you are using EAC, I recommend reaching to the Action menu to enable “Append Gaps to Previous Track (default)”. Next time, for the other CD you will want to rip, this option will stay put and you won’t need to go back and click it.

Now, you can start with pressing F4 (for Action > Detect Gaps) and let EAC detct the useless empty spaces between tracks (the so-called gaps). A few seconds and you’re back to the previous state, but ready to rip.

Press Shift-F6 and let EAC do its job. It will ask where you want to store the FLAC files (the waveform). It’s up to you, really.

This next steps is the longest (EAC must read the whole CD from start to end). It may be quite long if it finds the CD quite degraded and must read the tracks several times to recover a perfect image of your prefered music track. Let it do its job and be patient, this is worth it.

When it’s finished, it will eject the disc, play a little sound and wait for the next CD.

Technical thanks

I must heartily thank those who helped me build this guide. All original ideas come from them, all errors come from me.

• CaptainRookie guide.
• TechRadar FLAC rip guide.
• A Quick and Easy Guide on How to Rip CD to FLAC.

Conclusion

Now is the time for you to do it by yourself. It’s not that Exact Audio Copy is ripping your audio discs by itself, or that it takes no time. But I believe that this guide may help you (like it did for me) spend minimal time on this overly tedious task of ripping all your music into good FLAC files.

But when I wanted to transfer ma CD library to a more user-friendly form (did you notice that the CD player has disappeared from the new cars, like the dinosaur audio tape player?), I came to consider that the MP3 recording format has a slight issue for the audiophile (even the amateur): It is a compressed data format, that is reducing audio quality (supposedly an inaudible reduction though). Oh! You can choose the compression ratio (or rather the more imprecise data flow rate in kbps). But I’m still convinced that this a way to inelegantly balance between an unsavory compression and the space used on the storage media.

While it is a pity admitting that after the near-Earth-shaking launch of a CD-A able to faithfully record (within limits sets by 16 bits and 44kHz), here we are back to state where we are stuck with a technical solution invented to solve the problem of many years ago when thumb drives were so small… Today, any recording storage you will find (USB thumb drives, MP3 players, partable discs, smartphnones, etc.) contains so many gigabytes of space that you can store as many albums you’d like to.

So, why not come back to the original quality? This is exactly the proposition from the FLAC recording format. It reduces the original size by 50% (sometimes a little more), via a lossless compression algorithme wich is faithful to the original. Moreover, except some prehistoric MP3 players of dubious origin, no reasonable MP3 players will rejct FLAC files (some other lossless recording formats exist but they less well globally accepted; And we still want the ease of use when got used to wiht MP3).

FLAC: Try it once, keep for life!

I thought I had the advantage of shelf-available old disk drives that I could use to jump-start the new NAS (some had previously been used for years in the DS413j while upgrading from smaller sizes) without an immediate need for new purchases. But if this was definitely not a full success, it proved fascinating. I started experimenting with the three 3TB WD Red (about 3-year old) and one 2TB Seagate (significantly older).

DSM immediately informed me of 970 reallocated sectors on the old Seagate. An immediate and extensive SMART test brought 2 more re-allocations. This one is dying. Even in a RAID, you don’t want this. It is going into recycling storage bin. I’ll start with only 3x3TB. Another disk can wait since I just need a few TB in the short term.

Parity Consistency Check on three WD Red disks: Two sectors are marked as re-identified (I still have to check the exact meaning).

Intermediate conclusions:

• I will need to purchase new magnetic blades in the short term.
• Thanks to DSM for a clear and meaningful identification of the risks, even before use of the disk!
• Even with long-term shelf storage (or because of it), hard disk drives can age badly.

I now need to test (out of sheer curiosity) some really old hard disk drives of low capacity, in order to get a feeling about how they have been aging on my shelf, with only sporadic uses.

Result: Out of two old Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 750GB drives, only one appears clean (the other already exhibits 116 reallocations); On the opposite, a Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 160Go is flying high without any apparent issue, according to SMART.

Lesson learned: It’s no use trying to go cheap and believing in old hard disk drives. They may certainly be able to provide some additional side service (easy to put them in an external enclosure). But they must stay protected by a good backup strategy and, for sure, the strategy should not rely on them.

The observation

CD-ROM are annonced as being able to live a century-long life. CD-R are supposed to be nearly as sturdy. However, it seems that experience is not fully supporting these claims.

While, in my collection of 600 albums, I have many audio CD which were bought in the 80’s and that spent part of their time in the gloves compartment of a -sometimes- overheated small car, none ever failed me. 20 years already and no random failure. I’d guess a century is a reasonable target.

On the other hand, my experience with CD-R tells me that they should not be used for storage. And I mean “any kind of storage”.

In the last four years I burnt around 500 silver discs for various archival purposes. I have been using several CD writers from different brands (Toshiba, Teac, etc.) and various interface technologies (IDE, SCSI, etc.) The empty discs where coming from all kinds of brands. So, I’d say I have a fairly good statistical idea of this kind of market and it is depressing: CD-R media is not worth it.

Around 20% of all discs are unreadable just a few months (maybe a year) after writing.

It would be re-assuring – in a sense – if I could say that some brands are better than others. Actually, I can’t. No-name dirt-cheap blank media is just what you should expect: Nothing survives after a year.

The origin

Even if it is difficult to know for sure, I have been trying to identify the most plausible source of this fast decay. The technical literature usually points to two dangers.

The first one is heat. High temperatures tends to deteriorate the sensitive surface. So, you are advised to keep your discs in a temperate room environment (for really long term, some corporations go to the extremes of near freezing lows in controlled humidity).

The other enemy of your data is light. This, I could easily confirm with some discs I forgot on the corner of an old stack of paper. Direct light will transform the sensitive surface to the point that the shadow of objects is visible. Bad, bad, bad! So avoid light at all costs. It may be as easy as storing discs in closed cupboards instead of an open shelf (this was my own mistake). Don’t be fooled by the plastic cases: They reduce the amount of light (and UV light) received by the CD, but they are not enough.

Software solutions?

When things went so wrong that you are starting to get errors from the discs you read, what should you do? I am unsure. There are many products on the market that claim that they can read the data from your failing media. Possible candidates are:

• CDcheck
• CD/DVD Diagnostic

Unfortunately my experience seems to prove that when the disc is still without errors, these products are (obviously) useless; Later, I never suceeded in recovering lost data. It seems that the best ones repetitively read the same sector applying statistic laws to discard errors and find the right data. Unfortunately, this is not very different from what all modern CD drives do silently when they discover a first error. So, you are not informed early of the failures of the media. When you hear about them (when an error is reported), it means that the siuation is already out of control. It means that tools like CDcheck should be used preventively. If reading a disc is still feasible but request some retries, it is time to restart from a fresh copy and dump the old failing disc . If you are willing to maintain this kind of long term commitment…

The real solution (my solution)

My preference goes to something else. I decided that the combination of rapidly failing optical media and ugly prophylactic procedures was too much for me.

Currently, I am commited to purely magnetic storage: Hard disc drives are not much more expensive than CD-R and they have an excellent longevity (this is even better if you allow the disc to sleep when unused for long periods of time): More than 100,000 hours between failures is not uncommon and this is more than 11 years of permanent use.

Even better

Despite this sturdiness, hard discs are not eternal. A power spike can be fatal, electronic components are prone to rare but random failures, plain bad luck is a fact of life.

In my eyes, RAID technology is the way to go. Already, a number of recent motherboards include either RAID-0 or RAID-5 technology that allow to use several disc at the same time to improve reliability at the cost of some lost storage space. I’ll provide more about this in later writings.

I had explored several on-line options like:

1. Amazon Cloud Drive, which is now quite expensive when you send it several tera-bytes.
2. OVH Cloud Archive, that I failed to configure (even with the help of the OVH excellent support team); I had to look at OVH Cloud which is actually priced very similarly to ACD (the price structure is a bit complex, though probably a bit cheaper in the long run).
3. Hubic, which decided to close its doors to new customers.

So, the only solution left was elsewhere: Archiving to an external USB hard drive, but alternating between two physical disks to allow always keeping one off-site (far from fire and flood).

The configuration is not very complicated but requires a bit of attention and of patience.

Pre-requisites  on Synology DSM

The main advantage of Synology is their comprehensive interface very consistent from one NAS model to another (DSM). So, this will essentially apply to all Synology configurations, large or small.

The general idea is to backup one directory from the Synology server to the USB3 external drive. You need the “Hyper Backup” package installed. It is perfectly apt to backups toward a variety of options (I previously used it with Amazon Drive (now too expensive to my taste) and with the now-dead hubiC).

A simple recommendation: Don’t apply versionning on the NAS itself (it tends to eat a ton of space up and appears difficult/impossible reconfigure later on). On the other hand, you can ask that from Hyper Backup which does it perfectly well. Eat space on low cost external storage rather than on high-cost primary storage.

Configuration

Format the hard disk drive(s)

I have chosen 8 tera-byte disks from Seagate. At first, I was looking at the unusual (but cheap) Seagate Archive 8TB. but they have now been replaced with Seagate Barracuda 8TB 5400rpm (which have about the same read speed but a much better write speed, for a similar cost).

Let’s start with connecting the hard drive (in its USB3 enclosure which has been selected as UASP-capable for best performance) to the Synology. It will be immediately recognized and mounted by DSM as USB Disk 1 (or USB Disk 2, depending on the USB port you used). It is highly recommended to format it with a single EXT4 partition.

In the DSM Configuration Panel, under the “External Devices” category, you will select the USB Disk 1 and click on the “Format” button. then, chose the default options.

Progress will be slow (half an hour is usual) but with no special issue to expect.

Name the hard disk drive

This is not very critical, but much more comfortable to name the disk (Data1 and Data2, if you want; For me, it will be Sciurus vulgaris 1 and 2).

Just after formatting, in the DSM Configuration Panel, under “Shared Folder”, select the usb_share_1 directory (the number may vary), then click on the “Edit” button to access a few options including disk naming.

I recommend (your choice) some options:

1. Hide the directory in “Network locations” and “Hide sub-directories” to limit the attack surface of a potential intruder.
2. Encryption: It may come later.
3. Access control: Limit it to the only user which is running Hyper Backup (Nobody else is supposed to directly access your archive).

Configuration of Synology HyperBackup

As I decided to use HyperBackup, everything will be quite simple from this point. In HyperBackup, click on  +, then “Data backup task”.

You will need to designate a backup on an external drive with “Local folder & USB” in the dialog window shown here.

You will then need to describe your backup(s) from several dialogs that are more or less explicit. First, you must point to the destination (the external USB disk):

Then, you will be invited to point to the directory (possibly several of them) that will be backed up. Then,  HyperBackup may offer to backup the parameters from some of the applications you installed on your Synology NAS (I chose not to do this, but it’s really your choice), before arriving to the main settings dialog:

The most critical is certainly client-side encryption (at the bottom of the dialog) which will allow password-protecting the backup data set. As we are intending to leave the external USB disks on a distant shelf, I strongly recommend to protect it against prying eyes. But, be sure not to forget the password, of course…

Then, you will have the opportunity to set the versioning parameters (to be able to travel back in time in your backups to recover one of the successive version backups of a given file). I chose the SmartRecycle parameter with 64 versions (nine months of protection if I apply a daily backup). But you may want to experiment a little in order to make your own decision.

Don’t forger to do this twice: One task per hard disk drive will allow HyperBackup to keep backing up when disks move out or come back from cold storage, depending on which is stored away (each month, maybe).

Finally…

Never forget that a backup only works if you can use its restore feature. It is best to spend a few hours every 6 months to restore a few files and check that everything is still working.

Of course, the best is to test the whole installation in the first hours after setting it up (at least, if you want to write down the restore procedure; You may need it some time in the future…)

wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to recognize them? Yes, of course. The simpler solution? Put a different name on each drive, but this is very small step. We know that graphical interfaces work better. Why not replace all these ugly grey icons with something ore meaningful (and more pleasant)?

A simple process

The only requirements are:

• Access to Google image search (but you can use another one, of course)
• Use of a simple image editor able to save to “Windows .ICO” file format – I use IrfanView which is very feature-rich, but simple to use and perfectly free (as in free beer).

Step-by-step:

1. Define an image which is representing the drive well,
2. Collect this picture,
3. Set it to the right format,
4. Set it up on the USB drive.

Step by step

Define the image for your icon

I recommend several possible and complementary approaches. Keep in mind that the objective is to easily recognize the USB thumb drives or the disk drives connected to the computer USB port(s). Nota bene: This works with internal hard drives too.

Solution #1: If the USB thumb drive is very recognizable, you can find on the web some good photo representing it nice and well. You can even collect a press release photo form the manufacturer if you have the manufacturer name and the product model. For example, I can look for photos of external hard drives from Western Digital, MyPassport model, red color. Google result is offering a wide choice of good pictures:

AEven if you don’t have the exact name of the thumb drive (not all of Chinese-sourced drives are named properly), it is quite easy to look for a good description like “orange USB drive”. Less precise, somewhat more error-prone, but it works astonishingly well.

Solution #2: With the same Google Image Search, look for a nice photo that would represent the disk contents (or its name). Try looking for “cinema” or “movies” or “old movies” or “1980 movies” for a hard drive you expect will hold your movie collection You will be surprised by the available choice.

Choice reduction

Faced with so many options, I recommend limiting yourself with some specific search filters. (on the Google page, press the “Tools” button and choose the following filters):

1. Only take large size images (you’ll see it is important)
2. Select public domain pictures that you can modify: “Labeled for re-use with modification” (Why steal a photo when you can use one its author wants to share?).
3. Most critical: Chose a very simple, pretty but easily recognizable picture (an icon may be very small).
4. Last recommendation: It is often better to start from an image with a white or very lightly colored background (it “works” better in most cases, as you will see).

Collect the picture

Download the image you found on Google.

Create the icon

After all, an icon is merely a square image brought down to a small size and in special ICO format. the walkthrough is rather simple, you’ll see.

Load the image in IrfanView.

Modify the size of the picture to move to a square ratio (change canvas size). You can do it by either enlarging or reducing the canvas size (choosing the right background color).

The result should be a nice square picture but you may feel that it is rather large for an icon.

As a matter of fact, size does not matter much here. The larger, the better to keep the icon looking good when changing display sizes. Now comes the time to make sure that the size is exactly a multiple of 2 (eg. 2048×2048 pixels). It is not useful to go further than 4096×4096 pixels, but do not go below 1024×1024 pixels. IrfanView will do this easily, from Image>Resize/resample... menu.

Then, you need to save the picture as .ICO file (be sure to use “Save as type” with the “ICO – Windows icon” option).

Setup on the USB drive

This icon (this ICO file) must be saved at the root of the USB thumb drive (in the  D:\ directory), preferably under the autorun.ico name (but we can accommodate any other name like Lynx.ico).

Last, copy or create a text file named autorun.inf with the following contents (also in D:\ directory), :

[autorun]
ICON="autorun.ico"


This small file will allow Windows finding the icon named autorun.ico (or any other name that you previously chose)).

Result

Now, your icons will be perfectly distinguishable. Like here with drawings, pictures, photographs, logos, etc.

Bonus: this is applicable to your company logo. If you give USB thumb drives away, better than putting any photo, install your company logo for a fully personalized thumb drive!

I am using an optical fiber connection (actually limiteless here) and I synchronize from a Synology DS413j which is defintely weak in CPU (a mono-core ARM). This is probably understating the actual maximum capacity of ACD. Nevertheless, I ran around 60 GB per day for several days. This can be judged on a few hundreds of giga-bytes:

Complement:

The actual transfer speed fluctuated (I was using the server in real production during the initial synchronisation, by adding and moving many files around). The most interesting is that a parameter actuall influenced the overall rate: The number of simultaneous threads/files simultaneously synchronised (no surprise here). The initial value of 3 was nearly immediately upgraded to 6 files and the rate quickly stabilized around 60 GB/day. When I climbed to 9 simultaneous files, the rate went nearly up to 90 GB/day (a little before the yellow curve stops). But moving up to 12 files did not bring any additional gain (out of the graph). You may have to experiment to find your own value (probably depending on the CPU of your Synology server and the possible limitations of your link to ACD).

1. Backups
2. Synchronization between several machines (several PC and several iPhone)

CrashPlan easily provided the backup feature despite a high volume of photo files (more than 2 TB as of today), but was relatively poor interms of synchronization. So, it was time to spend some energy defining the whole need/specification and finding a true solution.

Specification

For backup, my requirements have long been defined:

1. At least three backup copies
2. At least two different technologies (e.g; not to rely only on optical drives or hard drives)
3. At least one off-site location (to be protected against theft, fire hazards, etc., think off-site, or cloud, or external/bank safe box)

For synchronization, previous use of DropBox and Evernote (on small volumes) allowed me to confirm the precise needs I had:

1. Real-time sharing of some critical files with daily updates (as for Evernote note files, or the database for my password management application, etc.)
2. Encryption of all comms (I don’t want to leak my passwords or my bank account data).

Solution

I was clearly influenced by several factors in my choice, and I will try and make these explicit (your solution may not be strictly identical to mine). So, let’s start by what I chose to deploy.

A smal file server (a Synology DS413j) at my home. It hosts 4 hard drives of 3 TB (initially, four Western Digital RED) in SHR/RAID 5 mode for a total capacity of 6 TB.

The large capacity was defintely dictated by the the need to host a large multimedia server and a large quantity of digital photos (Today, we have altogether much more than 100.000 pictures on this server).

The choice of RAID 5 was a very early one because of its optimum balance between overall dedundancy (you can loose one hard drive with no data loss) and cost (you loose less data to redundancy than in other two-disk RAID configurations). The Synology SHR technology is even better because is allows disks with different capacities (the two smaller ones define the maximum capacity. So, you’d better have one 500 GB with three 4 TB bigger ones; It would be a waste) and it accepts (like all RAIDs) to replace one failed drive with a new one (during the rebuilding of RAID/SHR, you have no more data protection but this is temporairy – and you can keep working in paralle).

Going to Synology was even more justified by a single important item rarely listed in RAID sevrer comparisons: The software offering is specially attractive at Synology. DSM (Synology OS) hosts  “packages” for many applications. The complements I installed (see below) are provided as ready-to-use instalations and can be easy to install even if you have minimal understanding of the inner workings of a server.

So, I was able to deploy a two-stage solution:

1. PC-to-Synology synchronization (three PC via Cloud Station Server)
2. Synology-to-Amazon synchronization (Amazon Cloud Drive through Cloud Sync)

Cloud Station Server and Cloud Sync are two applications from Synology which are installed in about 5-6 minutes (including download time) from the  “Packages Center” of Synology DSM.

If we start looking at the synchronization between PC (or iPhone) and Synology, merely opening the Cloud Station Server in the list below (in the management interface of my Synology DS413j DSM) leads us directly to a menu allowing to download the Windows application (or iPhone app) to install before starting synchronizations between PC and Synology cloud server.

A few clicks and it’s done. Nothing could be simpler. a few minutes and synchronization is starting. It runs in background (it does not hinder normal PC activity) and you will only notice the new change to the file icons showing that it is already synched ot the cloud (see examples below) or that it is still waiting for synchronization (blue tag).

At this point, PC are synchronized, via the Synology server. You can consider that this is a backup since I chose to keep all most recent 32 versions of each file modifications and to not let Synology wipe deleted files (they are stored in the server dust-bin). So, this is a Time Machine feature on top of a backup.

Important notice: The synchronisation between PC and Synology cloud server is very fast and does not eat up resource even on a small/old PC (contrary to some backup programs I would not dare name, like Cobian Backup). this is re-assuring: The end-users can forget about the backup running in the background, stopping if the PC goes to sleep and starting again when it wakes up. This whole process has nearly no impact on the PC behaviour.

Similarly, the iPhone and iPad can use synchronization (of some files, I don’t want them overwhelmed) when on the move.

The second feature replicates these data to another location (here, I chose to synchronize with Amazon Cloud Drive aka ACD because its cost is only 70€/an which appears very reasonable and can be reduced if you have Amazon Prime and a lot of photos). I understood that transfer speed would be limited by my RAID server (the DS413j is quite old and has a very cheap ARM CPU, but it defintely did not break the bank) rather than my bandwidth (I have optical fiber broadban) or by Amazon (all users observe that Amazon is going fast).

Synology Cloud Sync provides this in a matter of a few clicks. Just provide your Amazon login and password. Synology will do it all for you. Synchronization will start in a minute at most (I tried it with Google Drive too. this is as simple and as fast – bandwidth is quite high, which is a good thing; I thought about trying c hubic from OVH, but Internet comments and face-to-face talks with past users seem to point to a product without the needed performance and reliability you want here).

Observations

A few remarks I may have to add after some real-life use:

• The DS413j has a very small CPU from ARM. the CPU workload stays very high (~100%) during all the synchronization phase.
• The first synchronization is lenghty (several days or several weeks depending on the data volume). I recommend to build the data set progressively (not to bunch all your data on the first day).
• Next synchros will generally be much faster (nearly instantaneous).
• Recently modified files tend to be synchronized first.
• I used Cloud Sync to link my server to Amazon, but there is also a solution to synchronize from Synology to Synology: Cloud Station Share Sync. I did not try it but it could be worht exploring if you already have to geographical locations (A second home? A company with two offices?) and two Synology servers. It seems to be as simple as synchronizing with Amazon Cloud Drive.

• In order to elevate the RAID server reliability, you’d better choose hard drives designed for 24/7 use. I would point to Western Digital RED (specailly designed for RAID servers) or Hitachi UltraStar (24/7 version of the DeskStar drives). Also, if you can avoid having all 4 or 5 identical drives, it will reduce the risk of seeing them all failing nearly simultaneously. See BackBlaze statistics on hard drives reliability.
• You may ask where are my “three backup copies”. I actually have the following:
  • The original files on a master PC
  • A manually-copied copy on a separate hard drive (at least one, sometimes two or three of them on spare drives)
  • A synchronzied copy on the Synology server
  • A synchronized copy on Amazon Cloud Drive
• While the Synology DS413j is no longer listed, you can stil purchase the DS416j ou DS418j.
• On the Synology NAS server, I ensured that the synchronized directory is not visible to Windows: A ransomware can’t see it, it would have to hack through the Synology software. this is protecting me against those ransomwares which try to encrypt netork drives too. (Anyway, I can still control my data through the web interface of DSM).
• If a ransomware tries to encrpyt my files (they may then be synchronized in encrypted form), I made sure that versioning is enabled on Synology (This way, I could travel back in time and avoid “paying the ransom”).

I just doubled the memory size made available to the CrashPlan virtual machine, thanks to these indications. The application immediately restarted OK. Instead of exploding after a few seconds, the 7000 file delayed in their backup (thanks to returning from Costa Rica) started to be backed up again by CrashPlan.

Seriously, we would prefer to see Code42 (CrashPlan editor) adding a small code snippet detecting this kind of situation described in the web page and applying by itself the changes without requiring dancing to a tune that is utterly inaudible for most of the users…

There is still to understand the restoration issues on Marion’s PC (it’s much more important to be able to restore than to be able to backup).

My recent experience left me with a few dauting questions that will need to receive quick answer if I want to keep my faith in CrahsPlan. Since I have near me three different computers on three different accounts, backing up on a daily basis, I witnessed two annoying incidents nearly simultaneously.

First, my main desktop computer (which holds all my pictures/photos) no longer can backup anything because the CrashPlan engine keeps crashing (no pun intended) after only a few minutes. Seevral days, no idea why despite multiple reboots. Is the fact that I recently reached 1TB of data (a lot of photos, admittedly) a kind of explanation? Did I hit a limitation? a bug of CrashPlan?

Next, on Marion’s laptop computer, we experienced a dreadful moment (violent crash leading to full Windows re-install without any warning). So, the natural reaction was to say “Merde !” and go quietly to the CrashPlan restore option, to get it all back. But, where restoring a few files had always been pretty easy (you should always test the restore function of your backup solution), an intensive restore is proving very similar to a nightmare. I believe that we will have every back soon, but it’s slow not only because of connection or server speed but because the server keeps disconnecting us and we had to restore bit by bit, very small group of file, by very small directory. Anything big or long (videos?) is nearly impossible to get before the next disconnect every 30 minutes or so). Ugly and painful as hell.

I tried many things. I think that we will be able to restore everything (except Marion’s photo archive – that is already on a local back, thanks to our multi-tier backup strategy). But it is uselessly painful and slow (several hours of tiresome manual work during a full week for less than 10GB; This is too much for a subscription-based solution).

I’ll keep you posted about the way my opinion evolves here.

I recommend specially both the novel and the movie.

The Kermit Project is canceled, effective 1 July 2011.

I think that I actually started using Kermit on a Vax 11/780 computer from Digital Equipment Corporation to exchange data between various microprocessor-based small systems.

This was top-notch high-end computer science… then.

The wallpaper is available in various screen sizes:

• 1920 x 1200 pixels
• 1280 x 1024 pixels
• 1024 x 768 pixels

This white paper explores the aspect of reliability for this relatively new and specifically difficult soldering technology used in the manufacturing of boards of electronic components soldered according to the newest regulations requiring not to use any lead (even in soldering where it has long been the basis for solder paste because of its low fusion temperature).

In Battlestar Galactica Online, you will play an intense browser-based MMO game. This unusual setup will be requiring some pretty unusual hardware and software combination to be sure to play in good conditions.

Minimum requirements

• Windows XP/Vista
• Processor: Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3000+ or better
• Memory: 512 MB of SDRAM
• Graphics: Any 3D Accelerator with 128MB DirectX 9.0c
• Hard drive: 150 MB

This way, it will be quite easy to play with Battlestar Galactica Online.

The creator of the fractal concept, Benoît Mandelbrot, just died. Born in Poland, the great mathematician had both French and American citizenship and inspired millions of mathematicians and artists.

Rechercher des fractales sur Google.

Don’t stop at these first images, and keep reading the article down to the comparison with printed paper:

Kindle at 26x	iPad at 26x