Sunday, June 17, 2012

CrashPlan + Apple Time Capsule

CrashPlan does not officially support backup to/from network shares.

Getting CrashPlan to work with Apple Time Capsule is a pain in the ass.

I tried following instructions on here:
http://www.marriedgeeks.com/2010/01/crashplandroboworkarounddata-redundancy.html

but that just resulted in CrashPlan complaining that the destination is unavailable.


Using the "unofficial" workaround:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/back_up_windows_mapped_drives

Gives me two mapped drives:

1. A share mapped by SYSTEM (S:) that I cannot access through my regular user account, and

2. a share mapped by my user that I can (Z:)

At this time there isn't really a proper way to handle this...
http://superuser.com/questions/432626/unknown-username-or-bad-password-on-network-drive-mounted-by-system-user-on-a-sc

It is a minor annoyance, but I've been running my backups this way since the beginning of June 2012, and I've had no issues. Everything backs up just fine.

I should note, that I do not use crashplan's online backup service. I use the free version to backup my data to friend's computers.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Adding network folders to Windows 7 libraries

Windows 7 Libraries don't support network locations.

The solution provided from Microsoft is to right click on the folder and select "Make Available Offline".

This does not work on my Apple Time Capsule. That menu item is not available in the context menu.

Instead, I used this Win7 Library Tool from Zorn Software.

Windows 7 does not recognize Hfs formatted drive

The Apple Time Capsule comes with an Hfs formatted drive.

Copy handlers on top of Windows, unfortunately, see the share as Fat32.

TeraCopy 2.27 refuses to copy files larger than 4gb to it.

The trick is to use the built-in windows Move/Copy to copy those large files over.

Live and learn.

Windows 7 transferring files to NAS utterly slow

Transferring files to my Apple Time Capsule was slow. I was getting speeds ~20MB/s.

Turns out the culprit was TeraCopy 2.27.

The Windows 7 built in move/copy is twice as fast at transferring files across the network!

Others have seen the same; unfortunately, there is no resolution.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

XBMC & libRTMP: fix for broken streaming videos

If your streaming video has recently borked, it's quite possibly the fault of an outdated libRTMP file.

Update the file and you're golden.

XBMC Wiki

libRTMP forum thread