Tag: tech

Nineteen-ninety-six

1996. The Spice Girls rock (pop?) the world with Wannabe. Will Smith kicks alien butt in Independence day. DVDs become commercially available. Scientists clone the first mammal. Ebay opens. Three important standards are either released or reshaped into their current form: MIME, Unicode and IPv6. 17 years later, a shocking amount of software still does not support these standards.

sigh

Windows Backup slowdown

My Windows 7 desktop is set up to back up to a Drobo B800i (over iSCSI) every night at 04:00, using Windows Backup. Even though it only uses about 700 GB of its 2 TB mirror, and only backs up a small fraction of that, backup jobs routinely took 15 hours or more. It could have copied the entire disk in half that time!

I set about hunting for a solution. One suggestion that turned up repeatedly in Google searches was to turn off the Background Intelligent Transfer Service. BITS is basically a download manager designed to only run when there is little or no other network traffic; among other thing, it is used by Windows Update to download patches. I couldn’t understand how this could help, but I had no better ideas and nothing to lose, so I stopped BITS. The next backup job completed in 45 minutes.

Patch Tuesday came along, and I rebooted the computer. Since I had only stopped BITS and not disabled it, it started again when the machine booted. Backup jobs slowed down again. This time, I disabled BITS, and I was back to sub-hour backups.

This makes absolutely no sense. BITS wasn’t even downloading anything; as far as I know, the only program or service I have running that actually uses it is Windows Update. BITS was slowing down backups just by being there. I don’t remember having this issue when I ran backups to an eSATA drive, so there must be some network-related interaction between BITS and iSCSI, but I have no idea what.

What Google knows about me

Based om my Google Ads profile:

Personal details
Gender: male No prize for guessing; it’s in my Google+ profile.
Age: 35-44
Languages: unknown I’m surprised they didn’t figure this one out. English, French, Norwegian.
Interests
Action & Adventure Films Vaguely
Air Travel I’ve booked two flights in the last 24 months. They don’t seem to have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time recently researching ferries.
Banking Who doesn’t use Internet banking these days?
Bicycles & Accessories I own a bike. I’ve ridden it twice in the last six years.
Computer & Video Games Yes, definitely.
Consumer Electronics Depends on how you define the term. Computers, computer parts and peripherals, yes.
East Asian Music No
Fashion & Style You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I always wear the exact same clothes?
Fiat Try Audi.
Food & Drink Yes, but not online.
Hair Care You have hundreds of photos of me, and you never noticed that I shave my head?
Hygiene & Toiletries I’ve used the same shower gel and deodorant for years. They’re both no-brand products sold in pharmacies.
Make-Up & Cosmetics You know I’m male. You know I’m straight. Do the math.
Olympics My initial reaction was “huh?”, but actually, yes. Mostly women’s handball, but also cross-country skiing and biathlon.
Online Video What does that even mean? You can’t throw a rock on the intertubes these days without hitting half a dozen lolcat videos. Not that I would ever throw a rock at a cat.
Rap & Hip-Hop They must have deduced that from all the P!nk and Avril Lavigne videos I watch on YouTube.
Search Engine Optimization & Marketing SEO & marketing “consultants” are scum.
Smart Phones Yes.

Backing up your VMs

A few weeks ago, I finally got my Drobo (a B800i with eight 2 TB disks) set up correctly so I can back up my Windows 7 computer to it. The only data I really care about on that computer are my VirtualBox VMs—so imagine my surprise when I discovered today that they weren’t being backed up! It turns out that with the default settings (“let Windows choose”), it does not back up your entire home directory, but only AppData, your desktop, your libraries, and a handful of other directories (including Downloads). Since VirtualBox stores VMs in a separate directory under your home directory rather than in AppData\Local or even My Documents, Windows Backup does not include them. If you want it to, you’ll have to either configure backups manually, or create a library that includes your VMs.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because backing up a VM’s disk image while it’s running is mostly pointless. Until now, I’ve been backing up my FreeBSD desktop by the simple expedient of rsync’ing ~des to a server with redundant storage; when I get around to it, I’ll set up a Bacula server backed by the Drobo.