i’ve already written a post that gave the folks at Data Robotics a hard time for not officially supporting Linux.  (It’s been in “beta” for well over a year, maybe two — and they don’t support LUNs bigger than 2 TB on ext3.)  I needed a LUN bigger than 2TB, so I was a bit upset.  Well, I’ve got my 8TB LUN and I’m happy.
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A little while ago I wrote a blog entry about how I was disappointed in Time Machine and how I was trying to figure out something better.  I believe I’ve found my solution, and even have a working shell script that does the job for me.  Those of you that don’t have Macs really want to pay attention as well, as what I ended up doing works for anything you can run rsync on.
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A couple of weeks ago I got into a twight (twitter fight) with Storagezilla over whether or not the term near-CDP should be allowed to exist.  He opened the dialogue with this parting shot mini-blog post, then went on to refer to near-CDP as non-CDP in this longer blog post.  My side is that, while the term isn’t perfect, it’s as good as we’ve got.
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My father, who is what I would call a “red-dog Republican”  (look it up), sent me this joke.  Normally I roll my eyes at much of the political stuff that he sends my way.  (I get all his right-wing stuff and I’m also on Moveon.org’s mailing list, so I get it from both sides.)  But I thought this was just too funny not to pass on.  I’m not making a political statement here.  I just thought it was funny.  BTW, do you know the difference between Tiger Woods and Santa Claus?  Santa stops at three hos. Now that’s funny right there.

OK, on with the joke.

I wish to offer the following “year-end” greeting to all of my Backup Central friends.
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I’ve learned a little about Apple’s Time Machine today and as a result I am much less impressed than I was.  In fact, I’m wondering if I should use it at all.
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The “also ran” Clareti VTL (or as I called it, “the only VTL going after the enterprise not doing dedupe”) from Gresham software was quietly sold to Tributary Systems, Inc (a storage VAR) in October.  I’ve never heard of them prior to today.  Maybe I’m a cynic, but I doubt this move will change that much. 
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In an amazing twist to my ebay story last month about an abusive (and possibly fraudulent) ebay seller, the owner of the company behind the ebay id macworkstwo was just indicted for allegedly running a counterfit Cisco equipment ring at the same time — and the story gets even better.  This isn’t his first time being in trouble with the feds.  It turns out that he’s been previously convicted for mail fraud and even served time in Leavenworth for it.

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I am in the middle of a migration from a Drobo to a DroboPro.  I love the way these things work.  I love how easy they make it to protect your data.  It’s so easy their CEO’s grandmother could use it.  (I learned that they actually referred to Geoff Barral’s grandmother during initial design.  They wanted to make it easy enough for her to use.) And I think they succeeded there.  It’s not everything to everybody.  it’s not the cheapest box or the fastest box, but it does what it does well.

And then there’s what happens if you try and use it on a Linux system.  Let’s talk about that.
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Now that I’m trying to use my home-built NAS solution to store things like video imported from a video camera via Firewire, I needed much more performance than I was getting, as I was dropping frames during import.  NOT GOOD.  I sought counsel via Twitter, Facebook and email, and I got all kinds of conflicting advice.  I heard FreeBSD NFS was definitely faster than Linux’s NFS.  I heard AFP was definitely faster than NFS.  Then I heard that both of those were crazy.  So I decided to test for myself and see what happened.  (I do have a backup tie-in to this at the end, BTW — if you’re a MacOS customer.)
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