Home Server

Posted on by Jordan

So years ago, I had a Windows Home Server setup. (its in the archives here, but I haven’t dug up the link)

I was reasonably happy with it, except that:

  1. Microsoft Discontinued it, and thus almost no updates
  2. It would sometimes crash and need a reboot
  3. The client machines (aka the ones I really wanted back up, and the whole point of having the sever) never actually popped alerts to let me know “hey I haven’t been able to reach the server for three weeks now…”

 

After about my third multi-month backup blackout. I realized I needed to bite the bullet and tackle something different. I really wanted something that would be a drop-in replacement for WHS, with semi-automated backups and some sort of NAS shared drive options.

The best match I could find was Amahi a Fedora biased Linux solution. I figured the fact that they were selling subscriptions meant there was some incentive for them to stick around and continue to provide updates. It is billed as a really simple solution, and probably is… if you can resist the temptation to tinker with things.

So to save the time it would take to recount the saga of hammering out the wrinkles I created for myself getting things exactly how I wanted it, let’s just say I probably would have been better off doing this thing from scratch. I am by no means a professional Linux admin, but my current job has me logged into several headless boxes each day putting me somewhere near the classic “I know enough to be dangerous” territory.

That being said, I build this thing using Amahi, and it’s a good starting point. I just put the final piece in place today, giving me what for our family in 2017 is a perfect solution to our server needs (because every family has server needs right?)

  • Both PCs automatically sync pictures with the server in near real-time (using a three peer Syncthing  setup)
  • Both PCs do nightly snapshot backups to the server ( If I were doing posts more often there would be several documenting the trials necessary to get that going)
  • Both our phones dump new pictures into the PC photo pool nightly ( Thanks to the Plex mobile client )
  • Our collection of child oriented video can be selectively steamed or loaded onto a phone or tablet on demand

The only real gaps are cloud backup, but I have that configured from one of the PCs and hope that the mirroring of photos between each system ensured that we have everything that’s important in on several local boxes, plus the cloud.

I could go on about the setup… there are endless details to brag about or bemoan, but this will have to suffice as a point-in-time of the state of servers and photo backup at the Nelson household.

-Jordan

Do Your Backups Work?

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a few posts ago (we won’t talk about time between posts) that I was setting up a cloud backup solution.

I also still run local backups to a Windows Home Server setup.

A week or so ago, Heather mentioned that some of the pictures were missing from her laptop. I started looking, and discovered to my horror, that all the pictures were missing. 30+ gigs of pictures, carefully sorted and edited, all gone.

I still haven’t been able to determine what happened. The is no evidence that the drive failed, and I can’t quite imagine a drive failing with such precision that only the pictures, and yet all the pictures vanished overnight.

Whatever the cause, my first priority was to see what could be done to restore the pictures. I have a process in place that is suppose to use Microsoft’s SyncToy to replicate all the pictures from the laptop to a shared space on the server and then onto my desktop. However, the scheduling has been broken on the laptop for some time, and I had neglected to fix it*.

This would be my first attempt at restoring files from a Windows Home Server backup. Kind of surprising given that I have had the server running for the entire time we have been married. The restoration options are surprisingly good. I was expecting to have to blindly pick a nightly backup and overwrite the entire laptop with said image. While that is an option, they provide a file browser that lets you examine files in each nightly image. From there you can copy the files to an arbitrary location (even a different computer!) rather than simply restoring them to the location they were backed up from.

This let me recover a few key items, and place them on my desktop, letting Heather work with them while I ran some tests in search of the root cause of these issues.

Failing to find a root issue, I opted to restore the entire pictures collection and move on. It isn’t a fast operation given the sheer size of the collection, and was a nice reminder as to why I keep an Ethernet cable plugged into the router and coiled in the closet… at least I didn’t have to work at wireless speeds… and it still took a long time.

Even having taken a long time, it was remarkable how painless the restoration was compared to what I was dreading. I managed to have 100% of the files recovered within a few hours of discovering the problem. I would conclude this post with a hearty endorsement of Windows Home Server, but Microsoft discontinued the product at the end of last year, so… I guess it’s nice to know it still works.

-Jordan

 

*Suddenly that seems more serious, although I fear it would have simply synchronized the deletion of pictures through the pipeline rather than restoring the missing pictures. At this point I am afraid to turn it back on until I understand why the pictures vanished in the first place.

Cloud Backup

Posted on by Jordan

After having brought Hannah home, and taking a few pictures to prove it, I started to worry, as I am sure many new parents have… “Are my backups good enough?” “Should I be doing offsite backups?” “How am I going to be able to accommodate the sheer volume of digital media being produced here?”

As luck would have it, I happened to be catching up on my Security Now podcasts, and a solution was mentioned that sounded ideal.

CloudBerry is a program that manages archives on a number of 3rd party storage solutions, and allows you to compress and encrypt data before shipping it off to be saved. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, except they have good support for Amazon Glacier.

Glacier is a very low-cost backup option, that was designed with backup in mind, meaning they don’t really expect you to need the data, and you agree that you could be waiting a few hours after your request before they give you access.

Being low-cost was key for our situation, as we have discovered that the appearance of a new baby in our lives sucks up *all* projecting time. That means the “delete extra photos so the backups aren’t huge” project will not be getting done any time soon.

I haven’t actually completed a backup yet… pushing 50+ gigs up to the cloud over our feeble internet connection takes some time, but I am very excited to have found something that appears to meet our needs and won’t cost a small fortune to accommodate the dismaying magnitude of disk space consumed by photos within our network.

-Jordan