After a fairly substantial break, Late Night Links is back! Thereās quite the backlog and I donāt think weāll get through it all today, but nevertheless letās dive in, shall we?
Traditionally this is the point in our story at which I sayĀ āweāre done.ā Weāre not done, but I think thatās plenty for today. Join me next week (same time, same place) and weāll pick it up where we left off!
Itās been a while since Iāve posted code of any description, but Iāve been working on a couple of things recently that Iām going to make publicly available on my GitLab page (and my mirror repository at code.jnf.me)
Backblaze B2 Version Cleaner
I wrote last week about transitioning my cloud backup to Backblazeās B2 service, and I also mentioned a feature of it thatās nice but also slightly problematic to me: it keeps an unlimited version history of all files.
Thatās good, because it gives me the ability to go back in time should I ever need to, but over time the size of this version history will add up – and Iām paying for that storage.
So, Iāve written a script that will remove old versions once a newer version of the same file has reached a certain (configurable)Ā āsafe age.ā
For my purposes I use 30 days, so a month after Iāve overwritten or deleted a file the old version is discarded. If I havenāt seen fit to roll back the clock before then my chance is gone.
This one I created for work. Getting data from a SharePoint list into Excel is easy, but I needed to write Excel data to a list. I assumed thereād be a VBA function that did this for me, but as it turns out I was mistaken – so I wrote one!
At the time of writing this is inĀ āproof of conceptā stage. It works, but itās too limited for primetime (it can only create new list items, not update existing ones, and each new item can only have a single field).
Out of necessity Iāll be developing this one pretty quickly though, so check back regularly! Once itās more complete Iāll be opening it up to community contributions.
I have no plans to add functions that read from SharePoint to this library, but once I have the basic framework down that wouldnāt be too hard to add if youāre so inclined. Just make sure you contribute back!
If youāve been following my blog for a while, youāll know
that Iāve written a whole
series of posts on my efforts to take a few Raspberry Pis and turn them
into a DIY whole home audio solution.
If youāve ever looked at the product offering within the
whole home audio space, youāll know that setting such a thing up is either
cripplingly expensive, involves tearing the walls apart to run cables, or both.
Where we left off Iād put together a solution that was
glorious when it worked, but that was rare. Typically the audio was either out
of sync between the devices right from the get go, or quickly got that way.
Getting the Pis to play the same music was relatively
simple, but getting it perfectly in sync so that it could be used in a
multi-room setup eluded me to the end, and eventually I gave up.
The bottom line is that synchronizing audio between multiple
devices in a smart way requires specialized hardware that can properly account
for the differences in network latency between each of the end points. The Pi
doesnāt have that, and itās not really powerful enough to emulate it through
software.
So is my dream of a reasonably priced whole home audio
solution dead? Hell no.
The day they announced that it had arrived was the day I
headed over to my local BestBuy and picked up four of these things. I plan to
add two more, and I couldnāt be happier with the results.
Plus, it frees up the Pis for other cool projects. Watch
this space!
Iāve written a couple
of times
before about what I do to backup all my important data.
My last post on the topic was more than a year ago though,
so Iāll forgive you if youāve forgotten. Hereās a recap: originally I was using
a fairly traditional consumer backup service, ADrive.
This worked well because theyāre one of the few services that provides access
by Rsync, which made it easy to run scripted backup jobs on my linux
server. Their account structure didnāt really meet my needs, however: you
pay for the storage you have available to you, not what you use. When I hit the
upper limit of my account the next tier up didnāt make financial sense, so I
switched.
About 15 months ago I moved my backups over to Googleās Cloud Platform. This gives me an
unlimited amount of storage space, and I just pay for what I use at a rate of
$0.02/GB/Month. This has been working well for me.
In December I
foundBackblaze
B2. They offer a service very similar to Googleās (or Amazon S3, or
Microsoft Azure, or any of the other players in this space that you may have
heard of), except they cost a quarter of the price at $0.005/GB/Month. Thereās
even a free tier, so you donāt pay anything for the first 10GB. When I first
looked at them their toolset for interacting with their storage buckets really
wasnāt where I needed it to be to make them viable, but theyāve been iterating
quickly. I checked again this week, and Iāve already started moving some of my
backups over.
In time, I plan to switch all my backups over. So far Iāve
moved my documents folder and backups of my webserver, which totals about
2.5GB. Thatās nice, because it means Iām still within the free tier. The next
thing to tackle is the backups of all our photos and music, which combine at
around 110GB. That means I have to transfer 110GB of data though, which is
going to be a painful experience. Iām still thinking about the best way to do
it, but probably the direction Iāll go is to spin up a VPS and have it handle
the download of the backup from Google and the upload to Backblaze, then it
doesnāt hog all the bandwidth I have on my home internet connection.
The only other thing to think about with Backblaze is
versioning. Google offers versioning on their storage buckets, but I have it
disabled. With Backblaze there is no option (at least not that Iāve found) to
disable this feature ā meaning previous versions of files are retained and
count toward my storage bill.
Iām torn on this. The easy thing to do would be to disable
it, assuming one of Backblazeās future iterations of their service offering is
in fact the ability to turn this off. Iām thinking though that the smarter
thing to do is make use of it.
For me and my consumer needs, that will most likely mean I
put together a PHP script or two to more intelligently manage it, however. Some
past versions are nice, but some of the files in my backup are changed pretty
frequently, and I definitely donāt need an unlimited history.
Still, Iām very much pleased with the price of B2, and
watching the feature set rapidly improve over the past couple of months gives
me confidence that I can move my backups over and keep them there for the
long-term, because the transition from one service to another is not something
I want to put myself through too often.