Two Possibilities

April 20, 2010

Personal Backup Strategy

Filed under: Technology — Eric Friedrich @ 2:33 pm

Like most, I have an increasingly large footprint of electronic data being stored on my computers. Some of the data is very important (financial records and those Jessica Biel photos), while the rest of it is somewhat less critical. Knowing the risks of only keeping a single copy of things, I’ve been working on a backup solution that is simple, yet also meets all my needs.

Requirements

  1. Dead easy and simple to use. I don’t want to have to think about this every day or fix it constantly when it breaks.
  2. Can encrypt a portion of the data, mostly my old financial records.
  3. Off-site storage is a must. If my apartment is broken into or burns down, I’d like to have something left.
  4. Capacity. This one is a little trickier. I have about 2GB of financial stuff, which is growing pretty slowly. I also have about 10GB of personal files from college and life that I would like to keep around. Then there is my media that I’ve bought (music and videos). Because of the licensing restrictions, I would not be able to download again if lost, so I need to keep my own backups. Finally, there are about 20GB of photographs that I’ve taken. I haven’t quite figured out how to handle these yet.

The Idea

The backup solution I’ve come up with right now is three-fold, but does have a few shortcomings. First, I use a Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS NV w/ 1.2TB of HD space in a RAID5 configuration. This is the primary storage for all my data. The RAID 5 offers some level of redundancy against single disk failure (but not really against anything else). All of the important data mentioned above is copied every night from the ReadyNAS to a USB hard drive sitting next to it. this is my main backup should anything go wrong. Finally is the off-site backup. Using rsync + duplicity, I have setup a cronjob that runs every night and backs up the most important files to a webhost. This way, if anything terrible happens, at least I’ll be able to remind myself how much I paid in taxes last year.

Because of the cost of storage, I would rather not pay for the monthly cost of storing all my photos and music somewhere, but that may change as I compare some of the cloud/backup providers.

Update (7/10/2010): The crontab entry in use is 01 02 * * * /usr/local/bin/dreamhost_backup.sh

HDHomeRun Setup

Filed under: MythTV — Eric Friedrich @ 2:12 pm

The HDHomeRun is a pretty cool little device with the potential for greatness. Its got 2 Digital Cable/Terrestrial Tuners and a 1 gigabit ethernet jack. It will let you record directly off cable through MythTV and several other programs. Its one shortcoming- no CableCard support. This is the business decision of service providers and not of SiliconDust (makers of the HDHomeRun), so I hold out hope that one day CableCards will work under Linux. Until then, this box is only useful to record OTA and non-scrambled channels. This isn’t really that bad, because much of what I record is broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX.

The HDHR also has an IR receiver and can forward IR commands over the network, to save someone from having to purchase a separate IR receiver. Pretty cool feature and could come in handy someday, although I don’t need it right now.

The HDHR setup was pretty straightforward using the provided instructions. The HDHR autoconfigured itself using DHCP and was easily discovered by the HDHomeRun config program. Updating the firmware went flawlessly, as did the inital MythConfig.

eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config discover
 hdhomerun device 1019A8F9 found at 192.168.1.149
 eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config 1019A8F9 get  /sys/version
 20091024
 eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config 1019A8F9  upgrade ~/Desktop/hdhomerun_atsc_firmware_20100213.bin
 uploading firmware...
 upgrading firmware...
 rebooting...
 upgrade complete - now running firmware 20100213

MythTV Config

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Silicondust_HDHomeRun

I added the tuner in mythtv-setup and it was autodetected by Myth. The frequency table should be set to cable. Moving on to the next screen, I added a new ClearQAM input source & entered Schedules Direct info.

I then associated the input source to the capture card.  I used the channel scan for 256QAM on all cable frequencies. I had no idea on the conflicting channels, or how to deal with them so I just ignored the conflicted ones. A little extra documentation about the channel scanner would be great in this area. The HDHomeRUn is connected to Comcast cable in the Boston, MA area. If the HDHomeRun was hooked up to a DTV antenna, I would have used the 8VSBmodulation instead. Once done, I “fetched listings from source”.

At this point I could watch video on all the channels, but the channel names were wrong and the guide data wasn’t correct. The easiest solution is to manually fix the channel database using the MythWeb interface. Simply fill in the correct channel #, XMLTV ID, and callsign. The XMLTV ID is available from the SiliconDust webpage as well as the SchedulesDirect Page.

If you’d like to make your life more difficult, keep reading…

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