I recently added a mirror to a very simple zfs pool and decided to document it here for posterity. This worked flawlessly in a FreeNAS 10 system with two 4 TB drives.
Everything
How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud
Apple Photos isn’t the best application to manage a large digital photo library, but the integration with iCloud, iOS, and macOS is extremely useful. But even though Photos can process and store raw images, it is severely lacking in terms of library managemen. I have developed a workflow to remove raw images from Apple Photos and iCloud and thought I’d share it. Hopefully Apple will do better in future releases.
Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty
I was recently given an old HP MediaSmart EX470 server along with some other junk hardware. Although it has no graphics, a slow single-core AMD Sempron CPU, and just 512 MB of RAM, I was able to revive it quite satisfactorily. Here’s how I upgraded the hardware and software.
Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!
It’s an easy decision: Get a free ProtonMail account and use that as your verification address for important financial and social media accounts. Keep using whatever email account you like for regular communication, but don’t mix security and communication!
ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)
ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it’s inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it’s not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small office/home office (SOHO) environment. Here’s why.
