The best case scenario is that you have a very recent backup. The worst case scenario is that you don’t have any backup, and you lose valuable data, from either an emotional or professional point of view. Often, from both. This usually leads to nervous breakdowns, extensive cursing, going through a list of past, present and future deities to blame, and possibly weeping. I’ve done all of that, and I’m not ashamed of admitting so.

I have since taken on a “handmade” backup strategy. Time Machine takes care of the main system (minus a few folders), and I make extra copies of specific material (my photo collection, for instance) on different hard drives. It kind of works, and it’s better than backing things up on DVD, but it still feels flaky.

Optical media is the worst. It is cheap, but the limited size of each disc (4.4 GB) calls for voodoo rituals when trying to back up something bigger than that, not to mention having to go through the same thing in reverse when the time comes to pull it out again. Moreover, when the first CD-Rs came out, the manufacturers said that they would last decades. It never happened. Of course, quality differs, but I have had allegedly good discs, namely Verbatim and Sony, die on me after less than three years. When DVD-Rs came out, manufacturers said that these would last centuries. Yet they barely last a decade, unless you keep them in time capsules. The issue is that, unlike printed discs, user-recordable optical media is based upon organic material. As such, it is easily attacked by molds and fungi. I have witnessed with my very eyes the decay of a DVD-R, starting from the outside and slowly — and literally — eating it up towards the center. The solution would be to re-burn everything every 3 or 4 years, but this adds to the expense and is just extremely inconvenient, not to mention that it takes up a lot of space, in the most physical sense of the term.

Hard drives are a better solution: a much higher density (which cynics would define as the ability to lose more data at once), and generally, with today’s technology, a much higher reliability. Yet I have had drives die on me just because the power went out at the wrong time, or simply out of the blue. The click of death is a nightmare to me, and while cryogenic therapy can help sometimes, it’s not guaranteed. It also seems, from my empirical experience, that hard drives paradoxically last longer if they are used on a daily basis. Keep a disk off for a few years, and it may just never work again.

While having an array of hard disks works, it’s still not the best way to handle backups. However, a distinction should be made between backups and storage. The two concepts often overlap, but they are fundamentally different. A backup is a safety copy, something that you need to be able to recover should the main copy become inaccessible. Storage is for material that you put aside and that you may never need again. In other words, the main copy of a backup set is always available, but there is effectively no main copy of things stored away.

USB hard drives are a good solution for both, but they have one drawback: as you need more space, you start collecting power bricks and using up USB ports, leading to the purchase of USB hubs to connect to one another in a waterfall fashion. All of this adds extra risks: what if one hub dies and takes anything connected to it, both directly and indirectly, with it? USB enclosures are a better way to handle this, since you only have one or two of them and swap the disks inside. This procedure usually takes some time and involves dealing with small screws.

USB docks come to the rescue: they serve a purpose very similar to USB enclosures, but they are vertical and take disks vertically, much like a toaster. It’s a breeze to switch disks like that.

A common solution for storage, especially if more than one machine is used in a given household or office, is NAS, or Network Attached Storage. At its minimum, it’s a very basic computer with one hard drive and an Ethernet port, providing access to the former through common protocols such as SMB/CIFS, AFP or NFS. The Linksys NSLU2 is a very small device with a slow CPU (ARM5 at 266 MHz) and little memory (32 MB), and takes up to two USB hard drives. A whole set of unofficial firmwares add extra capabilities, but with so little power and with the forced use of USB, it’s still quite limited.

More current self-enclosed NAS boxes, such as the Netgear ReadyNAS family, have two or more slots. This is when things become interesting, because RAID gets in the picture. I’m not going to discuss RAID here, so please head over to Wikipedia to learn more if you’re not familiar with the matter.

Two-slot devices usually support three levels of RAID: 0, 1 and JBOD. Since we’re talking reliability, RAID-1 is nice. With two 1-terabyte disks, you get 1 TB of space (50% waste) with potential for either drive to fail while the other retains the data. Not bad. In any case, two-slot NAS boxes can be found for as cheap as €100, with better versions starting at €150 or so. Note that I’m using the prices for Italy. The disks are not included, so with two 1-TB drives (each priced €60), the total price is €270. With only one terabyte of usable space, and this means €0.26/GB, with no real ability to expand beyond replacing both disks with bigger units and keeping the 50% waste.

Four-slot units belong to another level, and mostly targeted at SOHO users. They are priced accordingly (hardly anything below €320, diskless) but support RAID-5. This is where things get hot. Four 1-terabyte disks yield about 3 TB of usable space (25% waste), and any one disk can die at a given time. This is nice. The total price of a fully loaded NAS would be at least €560, with a cost per gigabyte of €0.18.

An alternative is to use an actual computer to do all of that. There are operating systems specifically developed for that, such as FreeNAS (based upon FreeBSD), which is so power-conscious that you can install it on a 32 MB (yes, thirty-two megabytes) Compact Flash card, and run it off there. Or you can boot it off a USB stick, or even the CD itself (saving the configuration on a USB stick, which is useful if the machine is old and doesn’t boot off USB at all.) It also supports ZFS, which is extremely neat.

Now, I currently have an old machine that I frankensteinized from different sources. It’s running FreeBSD 8.1 at the moment, and it mostly serves as a download central. The specs are low, really low: AMD Duron 750 MHz, 512 MB PC100 RAM (some of which is defective according to Memtest86+, but I haven’t had any problems in actual usage so far), 120 GB IDE hard drive. It is not really suited for number crunching, and sometimes it’s often faster to download things off Usenet than it is to repair and unpack them. This kind of worries me about using RAID-5, and ZFS-based RAID-Z is definitely out of the picture (the recommended minimum is a 64-bit CPU and 2 GB of RAM.) The good news is that I installed a two-port PCI SATA controller I had lying around and FreeBSD recognized it immediately, so I could easily hook up a couple of SATA drives to it and use RAID-1, which I suppose is better than nothing. I could do that with the current FreeBSD setup, or I could get a €5 CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter and finally put those extra-small cards I’ve had for years to good use with FreeNAS. I would effectively just need to get two hard drives, and that would let me sail by for a while.

The best thing would of course building a dedicated new machine, powerful enough to handle RAID-Z (either with FreeNAS or with FreeBSD.) I toyed around with the idea last night while browsing a website that I have some discounts at. A decent machine, coupled with a couple of 1-TB disks, would set me back about €360. It’s the same as a four-slot NAS box, but with two disks included for the price and the ability to grow over time. However, I have concerns about energy consumption — embedded devices are always less demanding that general-purpose machines — and, in all honesty, having such a thing to run FreeNAS, which is somewhat “castrated,” feels a little bit overkill. Of course, while RAID-5 seems to be a bit tricky on FreeBSD as it requires non-official kernel patches, RAID-Z is supported out of the box and should do fine.

All in all, the cheapest intermediate solution would be probably purchasing two disks and the CF-IDE adapter, and mirror them using FreeNAS. Another good thing would be finding some PC100/PC133 memory of a decent size, say a couple of 512 MB sticks. Then, as needs grows and as money allows, I may switch to a dedicated file server brand-new machine, with two more disks and RAID-Z.

All of this, of course, whilst keeping in mind that RAID is not a backup solution in itself, and only offers protection against drive failure. User-driven deletions are, well, as catastrophic as they’ve ever been.

I think he has a valid point, even though the idea of a standard mains socket in a car doesn’t make much sense. Cars use batteries, and batteries provide direct current (DC). Mains power is alternate current (AC.) While there are indeed devices called inverters that serve such purpose, they are bulky and usually inefficient. Furthermore, converting 12 VDC to the European 220-240 VAC is even more complicated than reaching the North American 125 VAC mains voltage, which results in even bulkier inverters. To complicate the matter, most units are only able to provide a handful of Watts. Forget about running your iron or vacuum cleaner off one of them.

However, as I was saying, he has a point indeed. Car makers should at least offer customers the possibility of choosing between the standard cigarette lighter, which can be fitted with a USB converter, and the other way around. After all, such converters can be bought for a few euros or dollars.

I personally purchased a 7-euro “iPhone power kit” at a Chinese store, and it came with a mains to USB adapter, a cigarette lighter to USB adapter, and a USB to iPod/iPhone dock cable. Having a standard USB port (minus the data wires, of course) proves quite invaluable, as most new GPS units and phones can be charged via USB. Indeed, the European Union mandated that all phones be chargeable over USB starting in 2012, effectively paving the way to units packaged without a charger.

The solder-savvy among you might enjoy building a cigarette lighter to USB adapter yourselves: all you need is a cigarette lighter shell, a 78L05 linear regulator, a female USB-A socket, possibly a diode (for safety) and a capacitor (for stabilization), and some spare time. I’m not going to provide a schematic as it’s extremely simple. You may want to add a cute LED (with an appropriate resistor of course), keeping in mind that your source is 12 VDC. Better keep that Ohm’s law handy, eh? Note that cigarette lighter ports can provide about 10 A.

As a final thought, I have to say that I haven’t seen anyone using a cigarette lighter in a car in a long while. Most smokers I know use a regular Bic-like lighter even while driving. So yes, bring the USB ports!

I scouted my iPhoto Libraries for pictures, and simply dragged them into a folder I had created. I quickly stumbled across two problems:

1. The Finder almost immediately reported that the drive was full, even when it still had over 350 MB available, or that one or more files couldn’t “be read or written”;
2. 8-megapixel images are just too big for a Full HD screen, so you end up wasting a lot of space and possibly slowing down the TV.

Did I fix them? You bet I did. Read on to find how.

The first problem was the trickiest to solve. After trying to copy it directly using cp in a shell, and getting the same error, I decided to try copying the files without their resource forks. To do that, use the -X flag on cp. It magically worked, even though I’m not sure what the problem was, but using cp -X gives you the clean, data fork only images, and everything is merry again.

The second problem is more of an hassle, but going from 182 MiB to 63 MB (for 167 images) is certainly nice. After all, the output screen only has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, and it’s absolutely pointless to use it to display images sized up to 3456 x 2304 pixels.

So, how do you resize them in a pinch? Enter ImageMagick, an open-source image conversion suite. If you are on a Mac and you have MacPorts installed, you can simply run sudo port install ImageMagick and let it do all the work for you.

For the sake of the example, let’s suppose that the images are in a directory called stuff, and that they have the most random names; some of them have names ending in .JPG (capitalized), some of them end in .jpg (not capitalized). Isn’t that a nightmare? Not really.

Please note that this example implies that you use bash on any a Unix-like system. ImageMagick is available for many platform, including Windows, but you will need to find another way to run it on each file you need to resize. I personally use OS X.

Here is the sequence of steps we need to take to convert everything to HDTV size:
octavarium:~/stuff jollino$ mkdir _
octavarium:~/stuff jollino$ for f in *[Jj][Pp][Gg]; do convert $f -resize "1920x1080>" _/$f; echo Image $f converted successfully; done
Image 1b371a9f-a59c-4c5e-b9f2-9a8aa24c807e.original.jpg converted successfully
Image 2fb7c7da-999d-4744-b8e8-dffa5d466736.original.jpg converted successfully
Image 3a39767c-b830-4fb8-90ce-40d97e793c65.original.jpg converted successfully
[...]
Image IMG_0737.JPG converted successfully
Image IMG_0742.jpg converted successfully
Image IMG_0745.JPG converted successfully
Image IMG_0746.jpg converted successfully
Image IMG_0750.JPG converted successfully
[...]

The first command obviously creates a directory called _. You can name it any way you want, but I personally prefer very short names when dealing with batch processes, especially when there is little risk of confusion.

The second command is where the magic – no pun intended – happens. It can be read as folows:

1. Iterate over each file in the current directory whose name ends in any case combination of ‘jpg’;
2. In each cycle, call the name $f
3. Run the command: convert $f resize "1920x1080>" _/$f
4. Run the command: echo Image $f converted successfully
5. Repeat for the next file

As can be easily inferred, the actual conversion takes place in step #3. If the file name is IMG_1891.jpg, for instance, the command is expanded as convert IMG_1891.jpg resize "1920x1080>" _/IMG_1891.jpg.

The > character in the output image size is not a mistake: it tells convert that we want it to be 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high… but the aspect ratio is our main priority.
This means that images will not be smared to fill the 1920 x 1080 canvas; the output images will be at most 1920 pixels wide or 1080 pixels high, whichever can be optimized, and the other dimension will be changed accordingly. Okay, now that’s confusing. Let’s look at a few examples.

• A 2816 x 2112 image (4:3 horizontal) will be resized to 1440 x 1080. If it had been resized to 1920 x 1440, it would have had to be cropped to fit on a 1920 x 1080 screen.
• A 2112 x 2816 image (4:3 vertical) will be resized to 810 x 1080. That sure beats a 1920 x 2560 image (which would end up bigger than the original anyway!)
• A 3456 x 2304 image (3:2 horizontal) will be resized to 1620 x 1080.
• A 3456 x 1944 image (16:9 horizontal) will be resized to 1920 x 1080.
• A 1048 x 699 image (3:2 horizontal) will not be resized and will stay at 1048 x 699.
• A 2148 x 2148 image (1:1 square) will be resized to 1080 x 1080.

As you can see, most images will have a shorter horizontal side in order to accommodate for a as-tall-as-possible vertical side, as that is still shorter.

After doing all of this, make sure that the USB drive has a MBR rather than a GUID partition table and a FAT partition, and simply run:

octavarium:~/stuff jollino$ cp -Xv _/* /Volumes/nameofyourdrive/

Gracefully eject the drive, remove it, and enjoy your pictures!