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.

Windows Media Center Movie Project

Posted on by Jordan

This is going to be kind of technical, but I have to document the process somewhere….

I have a Windows Media Center PC, hooked to our TV. We don’t have cable, so its not acting as a DVR. I have been planning to setup a plugin called “My Movies” that does a nice graphical browser of all movies stored on a Windows Home Server box, which I happen to have.

I actually had most of this setup months ago, but had run into some problems coping movies to the server. My motivation for all of this is the fact that Heather owns *hundreds* of DVDs. To save space we threw out the cases, and put all the disks into a book. The problem is, its hard to even remember what the movie is about sometimes if they have a generic printing on the disk. The My Movies plugin gives you a picture of the box, and a synopsis, as well as actor list, etc. All really cool, but it was being stubborn about working.

First let me outline the problem:

  • My Movies is a free* tool that will do everything I mentioned before, and auto-add any movie placed in a folder it is watching.
  • It also provides hooks to copy movies using AnyDVD.
  • AnyDVD is kind of expensive for a hobby project of questionable long-term value.
  • there are a number of other cheaper tools that do the same thing as AnyDVD, ranging all the way down to free
  • none of these tools seem to work with My Movies, in the sense that you can just hit the “copy” button
  • I am starting to suspect the My Movies people did this on purpose, as there is no discernible reason the other tools wouldn’t work the same way.
  • Trying to find a work-around was painful, as nobody wants to host the entire tool-set to go from factory DVD to playable files on your hard drive, lest the incur the wrath of the MPAA

After something like 12-18 hours of fussing with it, I finally found a system that’s working. I did have one DVD fail to read so far. I have some ideas for that, but I will come back to it after I have worked through the majority of our library.

The system that works:

  • have dvd43 running, this will allow other applications to read the disk
  • use dvd Shrink  “backup” option to re sample the disk, set the target folder as the movies folder on the server

I think that I may be able to use “superDVDRipper” to get a usable video out of the one disk DVDshrink failed to read, but its slow and kind of finicky… so I will deal with that later.

-Jordan

Tech Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I have been looking into all kinds of data synchronization tools as of late. My primary goal has been to ensure downloading a camera onto one computer in the house would result in the pictures being available to the other computers.

In my looking around I found Live Mesh Not really the tool I was looking for, because it keeps a copy of the files on an online server. I am really excited about using Mesh to keep a folder synced between my work machine and home for keeping notes handy, getting pictures where I can grab them for blog posts, etc.

Back to the home network, my primary tool is SyncToy. It’s not the most user-friendly tool, so I don’t think Heather will adopt it as something she manually uses, but I have been able to schedule sync jobs from my machine. I hope to have Heather’s Vista laptop doing the same soon. There is a rather large side project involved, where I get to manually merge two huge photo collections before I can actually turn this thing loose with live data.

I turned WinRar loose on Heather’s primary picture collection (there is another one of pre-college pictures), and after a little over an hour of compressing, the .rar was roughly six gigs. That’s just the backup in case something horrible happens when I start merging pictures later this week…

Once that is all up and running, I think there are some cool Windows Home Server plugins that would do web-albums with a lot less hassle than what I am running on this website. I will have to look into that. Not to say its really hard to use Gallery… no I take that back… I don’t find it hard, Heather always gives up because it takes a lot of fiddling with things to make it play nice when you are setting things up or adding pictures. Here’s hoping the WHS plugin will be nicer 🙂

-Jordan