Imagine for a second that you have six hard drives filled with Data. Some are four terabytes. Others are one terabyte each, and you’ve already sorted personal videos and photos from other media files. Each drive is moved to its own folder
Two Terabyte Seagate has gone from being a drive to a folder. Bob 2017 has also become a folder, rather than a drive. Samantha 2018 is also a volume, rather than a drive.
While on one of my numerous walks I heard about ExFAT being compatible between windows, macOS and Linux so I was tempted to experiment with the file system. I heard this while listening to a podcast as I often do.
When I was on an iBook, or a Mac Book Pro, or a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Book Air I could be on APFS and Mac OS Journaled but as I slid to windows during the early days of the pandemic, and back to Linux last year, so the need for a file format that is compatible with all systems became more interesting.
Yesterday while freeing space on a number of drives I found that one failed to mount so I had to use the recovery tools in disk utility to get it to mount. The process took a few minutes. Once this was done I decided to move all data from that drive to a safer place. In the process I came across the frustration of backup.backup, or some similarly named folder. It’s the time machine backup folder.
One of the easiest things to do is to buy a hard drive, and over a period of time fill it, and then get another drive, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. People will go from a small drive, to a larger drive, and a larger drive after that and backup plenty of the files across three to five drives. The result is that you have terabytes of storage, and some files are “backed up” on every drive, whereas others are precariously stored on just one drive.
This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution.
I used ChatGPT for this help but this is to give you an idea of how to enable docker containers to boot automatically rather than manually.
Two evenings ago I was trying to sync files from Kdrive to the local drive and it kept getting blocked. I wasn’t clear as to why this was happening until I saw that Pi-Hole had throttled the IP address of the computer that was attempting to sync from Kdrive. It did this one in the morning, and the second time in the evening.
I suspected that for some reason the computer might go to sleep when it isn’t used, but a Pi doesn’t sleep, so that wasn’t it.
Two evenings ago I played with setting a No-ip host, setup the Swisscom router to make a Pi available in the DMZ so that I could access the apache server and Nextcloud from the open web and it worked. I had it all done within 15-20 minutes. Now for those with the “But why nextcloud?” the answer is simple. It offers two factor authentication and it is trusted by various EU institutions and governments.
Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web.
For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive.
While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.
Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.
The Pi 5 feels comfortable I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code.