On the joys of LibreOffice, the perils of broken hard disks, and why your disaster recovery plan needs to have more layers than an onion.
Jon on the joys of LibreOffice, the perils of broken hard disks, and why your disaster recovery plan needs to have more layers than an onion
It’s been one of those months. Too many deadlines, a trip to Cologne for a trade fair for my Manfood pickles and condiments company, and two bouts of flu – one from the annual flu jab and the other a truly crushing nasty that’s doing the rounds.
The latter caused me to cancel my trip to Champaign, Illinois for the annual Wolfram Technical Conference, which annoyed me no end. Wolfram is a company I love to visit every few years. Its Mathematica software underpins everything it does, including the Alpha cloud services engine, and is the very model of how software should be developed. Slowly, with care and consideration, to ensure the mind-scrambling mathematics at its foundation can be brought forward in a coherent way.
I love Wolfram’s clarity of purpose and the quality of its work. As such, visiting the headquarters, chatting with the developers and meeting the bosses – including Stephen Wolfram himself – is a rare treat. Alas, it was not to be this year, but I will make extra effort for 2018.
In the meantime, the Home Edition of Mathematica is still a fabulous present for someone with an interest in numbers, stuff and “things”. But make sure you get some introductory training material too, because Mathematica isn’t something you can just drop into like Excel. Which brings me to my next topic.
Office versus LibreOffice
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Office since the 1990s. In the early days, each new release was welcomed with excitement. Word for Windows was a transformational product, following on from Excel, which brought a proper GUI to the task, along with an underlying programming environment. Back then, it was fun.
I’m not too sure at what point things stopped being fun, but it was probably around a decade ago. By then, we’d reached a level of competency and capability that meant Office could do just about anything asked of it. Arguably, the same was true of the underlying OS.
Those readers with long memories will recall the fun had in the late 1990s with multiple CPU motherboards from AsusTek running Windows NT. Today, such an arrangement is just “meh”. The sense of exploring new uncharted worlds has gone. It’s like we decided to “Go West, Young Man”, only to finally arrive at the Pacific coast in Los Angeles, and to look out and realise that there’s no more West to find. Everything out there in a westwards direction is actually “East”.
So how does Microsoft Office keep itself relevant? It’s certainly easier and more explorable than before – but I find its insistence that everything has to live in a SharePoint server or OneDrive store to be a little annoying.
And then there are the bugs. I confess I tend to use macOS as my desktop, simply because, at the time of purchase, the iMac 5K was about the best desktop you could buy. There’s nothing wrong with macOS, built on a long legacy of NeXT technologies and the Mach kernel, but Office for Mac continues to frustrate.
It doesn’t always help that I’m on the Office Insider Fast Track for builds, which means I receive regular updates. Some can be a step forward. Others, two steps sidewards and one back. Last week, Excel decided that it would be fun to show the entire sheet top to bottom inverted, as a sort of weird vertical flip. It would eventually repaint itself correctly, but I can’t shake off the thought that there are far too many display and rendering bugs in Excel for Mac.
One thing is clear, though – the team listens and makes changes. I keep sending in bug reports, and they respond in a timely manner – and take these things seriously. So maybe we’ll get to a more stable platform in the end.
In the meantime, I’ve been tempted to look again at LibreOffice. This long-standing open-source rival to Office has continued to develop, and from a look-and-feel perspective, it’s pretty much what “Classic Office” looked like before the arrival of the infamous Ribbon.
And I have to say I’m impressed. I’ve given it a fairly hard workout, especially its spreadsheet, and it hasn’t let me down so far. Clearly, it needs careful testing before I’d consider moving away from Office on a permanent basis, but it’s equally clear that this is a program well worth having on your PC – whether Mac or Windows – as a backup alongside Microsoft Office.
The decision would be easier if the pricing was still old-school. I remember paying some £450 for a single seat licence of Word for Windows back in December 1989. Today, Office is well under a tenner per month for a whole family, including other bits such as email and OneDrive storage. Corporate deals are equally compelling on a per-seat basis. Without doubt, this pricing has taken much of the wind out of the sails of LibreOffice, and it might be that its time has come and gone, with Microsoft Office on the one side and Google Apps on the other. But in the meantime, it’s worth a download and install, and the effort being put into it should be applauded.
Dropbox, Backblaze and Snapshots
Dropbox for Business is one of the backbones of my business, and it’s nice to see that the company keeps adding new features.
The recent addition of “online only” storage is a big step forward. You can choose at a folder or file level to have that folder exist only in the cloud, with no local copy. As far as your OS is concerned, the file exists locally. If you click on it, Dropbox immediately pulls it down from the cloud and makes it available to you. The great advantage here is when you have a very large Dropbox storage estate, and a limited amount of space on a laptop. Just keep everything that isn’t immediately needed in the cloud, and sync locally as required.
My Synology NAS boxes have been given a good workout too. I accept that they’re the ones with the dodgy Intel processors, which means they could fail suddenly, but the whole point of a long-trousers storage solution is that you must ensure that any failure isn’t going to be a problem. If and when they die, I’ll buy the newer versions and move to them, given that they offer extra capabilities such as 10GB Ethernet. For the time being, they’re doing sterling service.
As a reminder, I have a pair of boxes – each with about 50TB of storage – along with SSD cache drives and hot-spare disks in case of failure. At the moment, the primary has Dropbox installed onto it, and it downloads all of the real-time changes in my Dropbox for Business primary account.
I’ve added two useful bits of functionality to make this even more robust. First, I’ve implemented the file-system snapshots capability, which takes a snapshot of the relevant share and can then send it over the network to another server. It’s seamless and built into the Synology platform, providing you have the BTRFS file-system capability present in the more powerful boxes. Taking a snapshot is then a matter of a few seconds, and sending it as a difference over the wire a small job. The destination server stores multiple versions of the snapshots on a daily/weekly/ monthly regime, and rolling back to a previous version is very simple indeed.
I could make this self-service for my desktop users, but I don’t do file saves direct to the server – everything goes via Dropbox for Business.
The second Synology box is about to move out of the building and across the courtyard to Merula – the ISP at no. 5 – where it will sit in its data centre humming away to itself. The main network firewall will move to no. 5 along with the second Synology box, and our internal LAN will extend outside the building to cover this. All of this is possible because of the 1Gb fibre connection between the buildings. As an “off-site” backup and archive, it should do the job well.
In the meantime, I’ve also signed up to Backblaze, which is an online archive/storage company. Getting this to work inside the Synology platform is a matter of a few clicks, once you have an account set up on the Backblaze website. So far, I’ve pushed about 1.5TB of data to Backblaze, and it’s getting a nightly archive from the main Synology server. The cost? About $7/month.
Yes, you need the internet connection speed to make these things sing, but once you have that, there are an array of online storage providers that can deliver backbone transit facilities such as those of Dropbox along with archive capabilities like those of Backblaze.
So far I’m impressed by Backblaze, and I should also point out that it publishes all the information about hard disk reliability in its storage farm. It makes for some fascinating reading. Backblaze holds some 40,000 hard disks, and 78% of the drives survive more than four years. The median hard drive survives six years.
Looking at the vendors, Hitachi (HGST) has around a 1% failure rate,
Western Digital around 2-3%. Seagate is variable, however, depending on size: 4TB at around 3.5%, 3TB at 9% and 1.5TB at nearly 14%. While you can use these figures to help make purchase decisions, it’s always important to remember the answer to the question: “which is a good drive vendor to ensure long life?” The answer, of course, is “it doesn’t matter, because a single drive failure should be irrelevant to your storage plans”.
ChronoSync
Part of my fiddling around with data, and synchronisation, has involved looking at tools to help keep the same files in one place in sync with the files in another server. This isn’t a replacement for backup, or archive, but another channel of copying. When thinking about a proper disaster recovery solution, you need to ensure you use multiple protocols and technologies. It’s unlikely that all of them will fail at the same time, in the same way.
So I use Time Machine to local Thunderbolt storage, Time Machine to NAS, Retrospect to the HP LTO6 Tape Library via Thunderbolt and SAS, snapshots between NAS boxes at the BTRFS level, and outside storage to Dropbox and Backblaze. Dropbox is synced between four physical locations.
Yes, it’s a pretty robust setup, but there are two types of IT managers in the world: those who have lost data, and those who haven’t lost data… yet!
Given there’s plenty of NAS storage on the LAN, it made sense to add one more file-system replication over SMB to the party. In the past, I’ve used Sync Folders Pro, but that seems to have gone off the boil somewhat – maybe it doesn’t like the most recent macOS releases. So I’ve been trying ChronoSync instead, and so far I’m impressed. It synced 10TB of data over the network in a quite reasonable speed, and the updating scan/copy process is fast too. I think this might be a keeper.
High-quality USB audio
If you want to add high-quality audio playback to a computer or smartphone, then the first thing you need to do is to get the device outside of the computer. The internal space of a laptop or PC is a fairly horrible place to be from the perspective of electrical noise and interference.
I’m often asked for a good solution. Well, the Meridian DAC Audio USB Explorer 2 is a good piece of kit at around £130. It can hardware decode MQA-encoded audio, if that’s your thing. Sound quality is excellent, although I could be picky and say it’s a little boring and slow. But there’s no doubt about the quality of engineering in the product – and for the money, it’s a bit of a bargain.
For deeper pockets, around £400, Chord Electronics’ Mojo portable DAC is simply gorgeous. The machined-metal case feels like a million bucks, and the design ideas are super-inventive – the use of the big colour illuminated buttons is smart. Sound quality is about as good as you’ll get outside of a studio. Add to this the new “Poly” add-on, and you have a portable streaming source of the highest quality. And hurrah to both companies for showing that we can do leading-edge technology, design and manufacture here in the UK.
Mounting virtual file systems
I needed to dive into some VMware virtual disks to retrieve some files, and also to do some comparisons before and after install. I found a rather nifty tool called Regshot, which can take a
fingerprint of the Registry and file system on a Windows machine. You can then install your app, and take a new fingerprint. The tool can then compare before and after, telling you what’s been installed and changed. There are a number of these tools out there, but this one caught my eye since it did exactly what I needed, without the frills.
To get into the virtual disks, I went over to Paragon Software – which has, for many years, done all sorts of useful plug-in drivers. If you want to add read/write NTFS to your Mac, it has the tool. Or add HFS+ to Windows. Or ExtFS to Mac, and so on. It offers a lovely little tool called VMDK Mounter for Mac, which lets you mount a range of VM disk formats directly into the Mac file system. It supports VMDK for VMware, VDI for VirtualBox, VHD for Microsoft, pVHD for Paragon, and VHDX for Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk. I installed and ran it; within a minute I had mounted the VMware images. You can’t argue with free – and so far, it’s doing what it claims.
Dell batteries
It seems that almost every week another manufacturer is found to be having problems with batteries, especially those that appear to physically expand when being charged. Even Apple might have got things a little wrong on its latest phones, if reports are to be believed – although it’s always important to separate a few random failures from a systemic fault. So far, the problems appear to be limited to a handful of products.
But I’m hearing a number of reported problems with the Dell XPS 15 laptop, also expressed on US website notebootcheck.net (see pcpro.link/280xps for the full story). I’m a fan of this product, along with its smaller XPS 13 sibling, and we have a number of them here in the lab for general daily work tasks.
The reported problem is that the battery pack expands under the touchpad and forces the whole device to split apart – although it appears to be limited to a specific batch of 84Wh batteries. I’m keeping an eye on our laptops for signs of anything untoward.