Ti2 Sentinel

Back in November last year, I read about this Kickstarter project on Uncrate via Flipboard app on my iPad.(I think). I’ve been looking for a waterproof cash container for a while and all the one I can find on Amazon are either too small (designed mainly for medications) or not cool enough, or just not what I am looking for.

The Ti2 Sentinel however, is perfect. It has multiple sizes to choose from in both lengths and diameters. It’s made of titanium so it should be very durable. It’s waterproof so cash or any legal documents should not get wet. And most important of all, the prices are affordable and in exactly the right range for me. Oh and it’s hand-made in USA. What more can one ask?

I pledged my money for a S6M since looking at the schematics I didn’t think the S6S will accommodate cash notes. The S4L will but I want something with large enough diameter to store decent amount of cash. The project owner, Mike Bond, provides detailed updates on the build process, which was very reassuring for the backers like myself. After waiting for 3 months and just a couple of weeks after the original delivery estimate, my S6M arrived yesterday. It is exactly as described in the Kickstarter project. Beautifully handcrafted. The square thread is particularly impressive attention to details. It is definitely something that is “use and forget” which is important as part of the emergency kit.

Ti2 Sentinel in plastic package

In plastic package

Ti2 Sentinel out of the package

Out of package

Dissembled into all three parts

Dissembled into all three parts

Lessons learnt from Sandy – Are you prepped for the next one?

What did we learn from our hurricane Sandy experience? Since my emergency preparation and Every Day Carry posts, I’ve added many additions to the Go bag:

  • 3 days worth of dry rations
  • LED Headlamp
  • Butane lighters
  • Duct tapes
  • Work gloves
  • Water-proof notebook
  • Thermal blankets
  • Water-proof map holder
  • Water-proof NJ road map
  • Water purification tablets
  • N95 face masks
  • Binoculars
  • Extra pair of eye glasses

But the more useful addition is the mental preparation. Both Leah and I were on the same page with regards to what needed to be prepared. We spun into action after dinner on Sunday (about 2 hours before power went out) when I started seeing water coming into our street. The binoculars proved to crucial as without it I won’t be able to see the water level at the street outside and realized how deep and rapid it was raising. Having the Go bag already packed meant we only need to finish a few remaining tasks such as:

  • Take all of our legal documents from the fire-proof box into the water-proof map case, which then went into the Go bag
  • Fill the bath tug with water
  • Fill all water bottles, jugs, etc. with filtered water
  • Pack clothing (enough for 3 days and appropriate for the weather) for the adults and the girls in case we need to evacuate (like in Irene)
  • Pack toiletries for the adults
  • Pack simple medicines for the adults and the girls
  • Sort out the order of food to be consumed. The ones expire soonest to be consumed first, etc. And make plan on what our next meal will consist of.
  • Turn the refrigerator to coldest settings to maximize the length food remain edible.
  • Move car from first floor garage to third floor
  • Check batteries in all the flashlights, lamps, and lay them out ready to be used
  • Check emergency radio is picking up weather channel
  • Recharge all iPhones and iPads
  • Powering down all electronics

As I was lying in bed, fully clothed, I went through the following checklist before I felt prepared (noted: not “safe”) enough to fall asleep:

  • Evacuation route out of the building on foot, out of the city by car, and out of the state by car
  • Which friends we can evacuate to. For example, the friend we evacuated to during Irene got even worse weather than us during Sandy. Won’t be much of an improvement if we drove there.
  • Nearby shelter addresses and how to get there

And during the seven days of no power and water, the 5.11 Tactical pants proved to be one of most valuable item I own. It has so many pockets of various sizes that I was able to carry my house keys, car key, wallet, flashlight, multitool, and knife whenever I wore my pants, which was always except sleeping. Actually we slept in our clothes in the first night just in case we needed to evacuate in a hurry. I have 3 pairs and was able to be wear them throughout the week.

Despite the above, our preparations still fell short on three major areas during hurricane Sandy:

  1. Power management
  2. Cooking arrangement
  3. Lighting

Power Management

I had plenty of spare batteries to power flashlights, LED lantern, and the headlamp. But there was no provision to charge our cell phones. Even turning off 3G/LTE data connection when we were not using it, our iPhones won’t last longer than 2-2.5 days. Thankfully we got to charge our phones in our building lobby but it should not be something we rely upon. My original plan was to use the Etón radio which has a hand crank and a USB outlet. But it were inadequate in charging a modern smartphone, which requires fair amount of amperage from the charger. And as a last resort, I can always run the car engine to charge the phones but I would much prefer not to waste fuel for that.

Actions

  • Purchase solar panel charger that can store and charge smartphone and tablet. Current candidate is the Solar Joos Orange.
  • When we move to a house eventually, a generator will be an essential part of emergency gear. Need to research the manufacturers, types, power rating, etc.
  • Invest in a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) for the NAS box. I had to time to shutdown most electronics before power went out but I may not have the luxury the next emergency comes. UPS like this should be able to support the NAS and internet router long enough for them to power down properly.

Cooking Arrangement

We had enough clean drinking water in plastic gallon jugs for the first couple of days as well as bottled waters from supermarket. We also had a bath tub full of cleaning water. Likewise with food, Leah used up as much ingredient and food before the storm hit. What we didn’t have is a mean to heat water or food. We had a fridge full of food but we could not eat them without cooking them first. So we ate cold food and juice/water for 3 days before local restaurants that were not affected by the power outage opened up for business.

Actions

  • Research camping stoves. Which type of fuel they use, how long they’d last, how much fuel supply we need to stock up for 3 days. Can it be used indoor safely.
  • Portable gas stove (like this one) seems to be a reasonable alternative if only for indoor use.

Lighting

The LED Lantern was amazing. It lit up the whole room so we didn’t have to live in darkness. But we only have one so only one room at a time could be lit. Not a major problem but it certainly can be improved. The headlamp was also incredibly useful. It proved to be essential when the only lantern was used in the living room, and one of us needed to do something in the kitchen or the bathroom.

I only realized we had 10 chemical light sticks the day after the power outage. More are needed so we can have enough to last 72 hours on light sticks alone.

Actions

  • Purchase more LED lantern. Possibly one for each large room.
  • Purchase additional headlamp so both of us can wear one simultaneously.
  • Purchase additional chemical lightsticks.

Synology DS1512+ benmarks

Here are some very unscientific benmarks using Xbench.

Internal bootup disk – Western Digital Green 500GB

Results 73.10 
 System Info 
 Xbench Version 1.3
 System Version 10.7.4 (11E53)
 Physical RAM 8192 MB
 Model MacPro1,1
 Drive Type WDC WD5000AADS-00S9B0
 Disk Test 73.10 
 Sequential 119.99 
 Uncached Write 117.65 72.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Write 101.81 57.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Uncached Read 133.10 38.95 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Read 133.29 66.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Random 52.56 
 Uncached Write 20.06 2.12 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Write 218.70 70.02 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Uncached Read 72.85 0.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Read 125.53 23.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Synology DS1512+ (2 x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB + 1 x Western Digital Green 1.5TB, SHD)

Results 52.87
 System Info
 Xbench Version 1.3
 System Version 10.7.4 (11E53)
 Physical RAM 8192 MB
 Model MacPro1,1
 Disk Test 52.87
 Sequential 30.86
 Uncached Write 12.50 7.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Write 54.58 30.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Uncached Read 40.95 11.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Read 145.74 73.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Random 184.25
 Uncached Write 71.69 7.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Write 219.30 70.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Uncached Read 1316.45 9.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
 Uncached Read 409.62 76.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Better safe than sorry

I can’t believe it has almost been 3 years since I wrote about my data storage and backup strategy! In that post, I mentioned near the end that I would be experimenting with online backup solution. To cut a long story short, I started with Mozy (crappy OS X client), then Carbonite (didn’t support external drive), and ended up using CrashPlan instead. It took a while (as in months) to back up all of my iMovie files, Aperture vault, plus other files totaling ~1.5TB to CrashPlan but it is all worth it because just over 2 weeks ago my Drobo started failing. The only reason I noticed it was failing is because I wanted to edit June’s NY Alt.NET meeting’s videos and iMovie hung on startup. Took me a while to pin it down to the Drobo/Hard Disks because I don’t have a lot of free time nowadays with 2 toddlers running around the apartment.

Turned out almost every file I tried to open on the Drobo failed with I/O error. And there didn’t seem to be a pattern as to which files are good and which are bad. Fortunately files I restored from CrashPlan seem to be fine so at least I have a good copy somewhere. After some more probing and waiting for Drobo customer support to response to my help ticket (not very helpful), I ended up purchasing the Synology DS1512+ NAS as a replacement.

Replacing my 2nd generation Drobo with a NAS has been on my plan for a while. Leah’s Macbook is getting full and some point in the future I will be replacing my 7 years old MacPro with a new machine, probably a laptop with SSD (Macbook Pro with Retina Display? Yum!) and it won’t make economic sense to store everything on the SSD or attached an external drive to a laptop. The Drobo failure just pushed the purchase decision up a few months.

The Hardware

The setup now consists of:

  • Synology DS1512+ with two Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5TB and one Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB (repurposed from the Drobo) disks, using SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) resulting in 2.68TB of storage, connected to the Cisco E3000 wi-fi router
  • MacPro now hardwired to the Cisco router via 50 feet long CAT5e cable
  • The NAS drive is mounted using AFP, with auto-mount setup

I’m still undecided on what to do with the Drobo enclosure and the remaining three 1TB drives. One of the drive will replace an old 500GB drive in the external drive that I use for mirroring my MacPro internal drive. I may create a RAID-0 setup for the MacPro using the remaining two 1TB drives. But then again, considering the amount of work involves I probably won’t.

The Restoration

CrashPlan

After setting up the NAS and created the volume which took less than an hour, the first thing I did is set up CrashPlan on the NAS itself. Since Synology NAS runs a variant of Linux (BusyBox), it is (relatively) easy to setup CrashPlan’s linux client and runs it headless. Relatively easy as in if you are familiar and comfortable with working in *nix terminal shell.

To administrate this headless client, I need to run the CrashPlan GUI client on my Mac and connect to the NAS via SSH. This turns out to be a little hacky. To make life a little easier, I make a copy of the GUI client, edited the necessary settings, and setup SSH local port forwarding. Even with this, I still need to open up a terminal, ssh into the NAS, then run the GUI client. I think it may be possible to script this process but I haven’t spent time to research that.

I have the CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited account and it is simply a matter of adding the Synology to CrashPlan as a new machine and started backing up files directly from the NAS.

iTunes

The first batch of files I restored were my iTunes library. The process to switch iTunes from using the Drobo to NAS was much simpler and more straightforward than I thought it would be. Simply change the iTunes library location in the Preferences. Clicked ‘Yes’ when it asked whether I want iTunes to move files to new location (this will only move some files). Then tried to play a file (any will do) and let iTunes figure out the file’s new location. Done. I didn’t use the library consolidate function because iTunes will try to copy the files to new location, which won’t work as the files were all corrupted on the Drobo.

I did use the consolidate function for Leah’s Macbook and the copy process took less than an hour over Gigabit ethernet. As the original files are left untouched at the old location, I’m planning to delete them to free up space after a week or so of usage.

Aperture

I keep the main Aperture library on local disk for speed with an Aperture Vault on the Drobo. Instead of restoring the vault, it will be much faster to just create a new vault on the NAS. Despite the fact I get pretty decent write speed to the NAS (~70Mbps vs. ~15Mbps with Drobo), it took a rather long time to create the vault. Probably due to the fact that Aperture vault consists of large numbers of both large files (images) and small files (delta edits, meta-data, etc.).

iMovie

This turns out the be the trickiest of them all for 2 reasons:

  1. Apple leverages the HFS+ file system and stores meta-data in the file resources. Since the NAS volume is formatted as ext4 and thus does not offer this capability, iMovie will not work properly with NAS.
  2. Apple decides to not even display the NAS volume in iMovie (most probably due to #1)

One solution is to create a disk image on the NAS that is formatted to HFS+, mount it in Finder, then move the iMovie event/project files to it. This definitely works for iMovie (and Final Cut Pro X) so I decided to keep that as an option and tried something less certain but less work. (I’m lazy, ok?)

Thanks to the power of Google, I found this undocumented terminal command that makes network volume show up in iMovie:

defaults write -app iMovie allowNV -bool true

I then moved the files to the NAS volume using iMovie just like I would with the Drobo. It took a long time for iMovie to start the file move operation but once it started the transfer speed was decent (~35Mbps). Much faster than the Drobo but no where near saturating the Gigabit ethernet.

I haven’t done a thorough check on the iMovie project yet. But the cursory check I’ve performed, it looks like this hack works. If and when Final Cut Pro X supports NAS, that will be a very compelling reason for me to upgrade.

Other files

Just straightforward CrashPlan restoration from my MacPro onto NAS volume. This will take a while as I’m only getting 9-10Mbps download speed from CrashPlan (my FiOS is 35Mbps both up and down). The restoration requires my MacPro to be running and with the heat during the day, I only run the machine during the evening so it will be at least a week before all the files are restored.

Lessons learnt

So what are the lessons from all this.

Drives fail, even redundant ones

One can only hope the RAID system will report the failure and continue to work while waiting for replacement disk. Drobo in this case did not do that. It just failed, epically and silently.

Online/offsite backup is necessary

Even with RAID system

Don’t be a cheapskate

Drink couple less Starbucks a month and you are protected.

Panic is avoidable

Because I knew I have a copy of the data safe with CrashPlan. Desperation will only come if you know there is a high chance you’ve lost your valuable data.

Fast internet connection means not a lot, if someone is throttling you

In this case, not CrashPlan but one of the backbone ISP between CrashPlan and me.

Will never buy Drobo again nor recommend it to anyone

I bought the Drobo because of its redundant feature. If a single disk failure corrupts data, I might as well go with a eSATA external drive and spare the expense. Even if Drobo sends me a replacement unit for free, there is no easy way to regain my trust again. How would I know if the new unit won’t fail silently like the last one?