The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 718 for Monday, July 16th, 2018. And welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take all kinds of information. Your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, our cool stuff found, our tips. We mix it all together. The goal, you know, we're past the halfway point of 2018 now. The goal this year is that each of us learns five new things, at least every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Bare Bones Software and also Ring with their doorbells and floodlight cameras and more. And I've got a deal where you can save up to $150 on a Riga security kit. We'll talk all about that in a little bit here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in beautiful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How you doing, Mr. John F. Braun? Yeah, things are kind of going up and down and up and down and up and down. You have a strange Wi-Fi connection to our Discord server today. You keep losing connection. You're the only one I podcast with that where that's been happening for the last couple of weeks. So I have to assume that you've got some weird networking things on your end. Wow. I don't know. Maybe it's one of those beta Eurolabs features I enabled. I don't know. Oh, you know it could be. I don't know, but this machine's wired, so that's not it. Well, yeah, but that would, the Eurolabs features, one of them is the QOS, right? They call it Smart Q Management. So that affects everything, right? That's just a routing thing. What are the other Eurolabs features remind me of this, John? Band steering. Yeah, that's just Wi-Fi, right? And then DNS caching. Yeah, that would affect the whole network, but it shouldn't affect your thing. That would be interesting if you turned off Smart Q Management, if that. But SQM, no. SQM you've had on for a long time. Like that has existed since before WWDC, and we've never had a problem. So, yeah, it's just, and I look here and it shows no packet loss with you anymore. Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating, my friend. Well, you know, it's so we're recording this episode well in advance. In fact, it's just after July 4th that we are doing this recording because we've got some travel. I have some initially and then John's got some. And so we, in fact, John, you'll see everybody this coming weekend that's going to Macstock. Isn't that right? Yeah, it's coming up. That's awesome, man. Yeah, my family travel, as it did two years ago, will cause me to miss this Macstock, which is unfortunate because I always really like to get to see everybody. It's a great community of all of you with us, all of us together. So, yeah. But John, you'll be there. That's good. Are you speaking this year? Or you'll be speaking just not on stage. You're not going to go. I'm not a speaker, but I will certainly be speaking. So if someone were to come up to you and say, hello, you would, you would. I would acknowledge their presence. And but you would voice your reply. You wouldn't just like, like hand write a reply or something like that. So that's great. That's good. Yeah, good. All right. So the thing today, though, is that, you know, we figured as we like to do sometimes, John, let me see if I can turn up the reverb here and make this work the right way. It's time for a deep dive. Yeah, thanks to I think it was Ev who made that that little thing for us. So we've got time for the reverb still a little hot. We've got time for a couple of deep dives today, John. I think we've had a lot of questions about photos. We've had a lot of questions about like NAS with backups and Synology and and then if we've got time, we've been saving some of your we've been saving some of your Wi-Fi and networking questions too. So why don't we start here with photos and see where we get that sounds good and sound good to you, John. OK, starting with Albert Albert asks, he says. I'm previously a Windows guy, basically a computer nerd, but I bought my wife her first MacBook Pro off of Facebook recently. And he says I need help finding programs to get her started on light photo and video editing. I know that the processor is going to be a bottleneck. It's an older machine, but she should be able to do some editing. Right. My wife has a Google Pixel smartphone for taking videos and photos and she wants to be able to edit and then post videos on YouTube. So this is I love start is I pick this to start with because there are a lot. There are lots of programs out there that we know about to do editing, specifically photo editing that are sort of very heavy weight things like Photoshop is the first that would come to mind. But I never use Photoshop anymore, John. I didn't use it a whole lot when it was the only thing that I had to use because it was always very confusing to me. But certainly now that there are other options out there, I definitely don't use it. There are really two that come to mind. And the one that I use all the time is called Pixelmator. Pixelmator is like I can't say enough good things about it. It is very lightweight. It's very compared to especially compared to Photoshop. Very low cost, right? I mean, well, Pixelmator Pro is available in the App Store. That's fifty nine ninety nine. But I think regular Pixelmator is still available on their website for quite a bit less than that. Oh, whereas it's it's not going to show me the price because I can't because I've already bought it, but I'll find the price. And it and it's like it's super lightweight in terms of just like doesn't use a lot of processing horsepower or anything like that. It's twenty nine ninety nine in the App Store in the Mac App Store. But it does everything I would ever want to do with images and so much more. In fact, there are people that I know that are Photoshop, you know, diehards that have used Photoshop for decades and very quickly switched over to Pixelmator once they first used it just because it's so much easier to use. It's so efficient. It's it it and it makes life easy. Like, you know, it's got like you can pace things in. You can work in layers, which is really helpful when you're doing different things with photos, especially editing. And and you can highlight colors and replace colors and everything just works really, really well. And as Brian Monroe in our chat room points out, chat rooms at MacGicab dot com slash stream. Thank you and welcome. It also works on iOS and I've done some great edits on my iPhone with Pixelmator. So it's really worth checking out and and one of my favorite apps to to use. In fact, I use it for every MacGicab. It's where I make our all our show images and that sort of thing. In fact, if you look at the show image for the last episode for 717, there's a little Easter egg buried in there. So maybe you'll see it. So that's that's one. What would you use anything for, you know, image manipulation or things like that? I have another one to mention, but I figure we'll throw back and forth here. I mean, I used to run aperture, but that's of course. Well, I think it still runs, actually. But I found that I was not using it to its full capability. Sure. And actually, I think for most of my purposes of what I want to modify in a photo, the stuff in photos isn't you know, it has the basic. It has basic adjustments. It's not it's not sophisticated enough, you know, like layers and stuff like that. That's that that's for the pros. And that's where you went. We want to move beyond photos.  I find that almost always does it for me, but there are a few other options. Yeah, I like. Oh, go ahead. I thought I mentioned in the I mentioned in the last the last episode that I still I use graphic converter. Graphic converter has in addition to doing conversions will let you fine tune many aspects of your image. So and that, you know, the program has been around forever. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good one. And if you want to delve into the open source arena, then you may want to bring out the game. So Gimp is a new image manipulation program. And that's also been around forever. Yeah, that's essentially a I mean, it was called Photoshop clone is the wrong term. But it's it's it's stated purpose, its mission in life was to create an open source alternative or replacement for Photoshop. I think is is that's how I remember at one point. What did they call it? But but it had it had a lot of the same tools that Photoshop had, like one I remember was like a smart lasso if you want to. Yep. You know, surround a complex object. It would do that almost as well as Photoshop. So interesting, interesting, cool. I've got a couple others to throw in. Acorn is sort of the the one that comes out of people's mouths. You know, as as the if you're not going to say Pixelmator, you say Acorn or if you're not going to say Acorn, you say Pixelmator. And and that's from Gus Mueller at flyingmeat.com. But you can download a 14 day trial right from there. And then Acorn is also 2999, just like Pixelmator and does a lot of the same things. It's a slightly different UI, but way easier to use than Photoshop and really, really well done. So it's, you know, another brilliant alternative and I think would run just fine on an older Mac. And then in the in the chat room, Brian Monroe suggests affinity photos for as a good editor. And that keeps coming up on the show. I've never really messed around with affinity, but but it keeps coming up. So I'm curious about this. And I think it's forty forty nine ninety nine. So a little more expensive than the other two might do a little bit more. I don't know. So so for lightweight photo editors, there you go. That's that's some some good ones. I like I like that we have so many options. It, you know, and and especially, I mean, you said graphic converter has been around forever and it certainly has. But, you know, even sort of what I consider the newer ones, like Pixelmator and Acorn, have been around for quite a while. And and and there's clearly, you know, desire in this market, which means that these apps are supported and the developers are making money. And so these apps will continue to to to, you know, thrive. And I think that's great. So there you go. Coolio. All right. Good way to get started with photos here. John, bringing us on to listener, John would be our next thing here and listener, John says, my wife has her own iCloud account and has her photos being stored there from her phone. I want to get these photos and download them to my photos app on my Mac, not in the same account. First of all, I have found out that you can't do a bulk download from iCloud to a folder, but even worse, when you do a download, the metadata regarding location data is stripped out. You know, we've talked about that. Is there a way to download these photos, hopefully in bulk, but more importantly, a download with the location metadata? So there are a couple of different ways to approach this. And none of them are perfect. One would be to create a separate user on your Mac and have that log into her iCloud account. And then, of course, it would sink down all of her photos. Then under your user account, you would use something like power photos to merge that photos library with your own there would be some permissions hiccups to work through because the multiple users and stuff, but it's it's certainly doable. Another way to do it is you could have her phone also set to sync with Google Photos and then Google Photos actually would allow you to share with a family so you could then sync with Google and Google's photos. Family syncing is actually awesome. Amazon, if you're an Amazon Prime member, their Amazon Photos app also kind of does the same thing. Very, very cool. And the way you can sort of choose how to share and automatically share and not automatically share is pretty good. And then from Google Photos, you could have it add to your camera roll. And that would sync to your Mac. And then there you're in your iCloud library, too. Or you could do that. Go back a couple of episodes. There's that whole thing that that guy was doing with Dropbox and and and Hazel and auto syncing photos as they sort of auto expert auto added to the library that was he was using Hazel to watch a folder inside. In this case, it would be inside of your iPhone, the Photos library on your wife's Mac and have it copy those to a folder that you shared with Dropbox together. And then it would beam those over and then you could use Hazel on your Mac to slurp those photos into your Photos library. And there you go. But I don't know if that would get your metadata. That would be something to check. But there's lots of different ways to do it. None of them perfect. Thank you, Apple. But doable. Thoughts on that, John? This seems this is the Holy Grail for sure these days. So. So in that same vein, so you can. Sync your photos from your iOS device to, as was mentioned, Dropbox, but I also use one drive. So considering the various cloud services, yeah, seeing if they offer a photo sync, you know, you would then share. That's one. Another. Yeah, there's a few different ones here.  You just want to check some of those options. Well, you could you could certainly create a shared iCloud library or shared. Yeah, iCloud album that the two of you share, but it's the process of putting things in there is manual. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, another thought would be one of those. One of these USB lightning kind of bridge devices here. The one that comes to mind to me is the iExpand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some of those have enough space where you probably should be able to copy all your photos over. And as mentioned, they have a lightning connector on one side and a USB on the other. So that may be a way to shuttle them about. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Those kinds of things can automatically grab new photos. That's true. I hadn't thought about that. That's an interesting, I like that angle. Cool. Yeah, no, those are great products, because as you pointed out, your options are somewhat limited. Well, in terms of Apple helping you, they're limited. Yeah. The one thing that I actually got excited about because I saw this option on photos running on my Mac is that one of the share options is the Air Drop. Yeah, Air Drop. But it's not an option. I don't seem to see it as a sharing option on iOS. Which is weird. Let me look. It would take a good long time. I'll highlight all your photos and then Air Drop them over. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, it says it right. Okay, I'm sorry, right below the photos I highlighted. It says tap to share with Air Drop. So, yeah, again, it may take a while to find out how large your library is, but that would be a device-to-device sharing. Yeah, I wish Apple would solve this problem. But they haven't, so here's the options. All right, going on to James, sort of taking a little bit of a detour from that now that we've sort of set the foundation here, he says, I have dozens of cookbooks, most of which I've not thoroughly perused, which makes me feel wasteful. I've been trying to OCR the indexes of all these cookbooks, not their entire contents, so that when I'm planning meals for the week, I can easily see how many different versions of a given recipe or preparations of a particular ingredient I have access to, but it is proving difficult. The methods, two methods I've tried are using a flatbed scanner, scanning the indexes, either using image capture or the scanner software, and then generating PDFs of the scans, and then using EXIF tool to edit the author metadata so that ScanSnap will OCR the document, so that's one. And then two, using a digital camera, set up a camera on a tripod, set the cookbook frame in the focus, take the picture, generate a PDF of the images, and then use the OCR to edit the audio. So those are definitely two options, and let you do all of the steps manually, and sometimes that's cool, but other times that's not cool. And for that, I really think your iPhone might be the magic answer here. I use a piece of software called PDFScanPlus from Smile. Right, same people that make PDFN Pro and Text Expander and all that. And I use it on my iPhone all the time to make PDFs on my phone of music scores, and I can scan a 100-page music score in about five minutes with this thing, and it's great. And I do it, you can choose to do color, gray scale, or black and white right in the moment of scanning it so you don't even have to go back and reduce it later. I choose black and white, so I get the high contrast thing that sounds like what you would want especially with the indexes. Do that. It saves it as a PDF on your phone. You can OCR it right there, and boom, you're done. And I think PDFScanPlus is like, I don't know, it's less than 10 bucks. I think it's a lot less than 10 bucks. So that's my answer to that. And there are other apps too. That's the one I use, but there are other apps that sort of do similar things. That's my advice. Any thoughts, John? I concur with the scan snap angle. I kind of like that, so I have one that they provided me with one a number of years ago, and it still works pretty well. It's their IX100. It's like a bar. Oops. But it's a profile. But he doesn't have a scan snap scanner, I think is the issue. But I actually agree with you. The scan snap thing would be, well, I don't know if it would be as easy because if his cookbooks are bound, then you've got to do it with flatbed. So I don't know that a scan snap would be the answer. This is why I like the iPhone option, because it's the same thing, right? My music scores are bound too, and it just flip pages, and I'm done. It's really easy. And I'm trying to remember, I seem to recall there being an image scanner that would scan books specifically. I think it was just basically a flatbed scanner or something. Or digital camera. Because yeah, I mean, you pointed out, you don't want to rip the pages out of it. Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Out of it, and books don't feed too well through image scanners. Right, right, right. All right. I would have sworn that I put this one in here, John, when we moved everything around. Oh, I did. Oh, right. Now I remember. Okay, so jumping to Ken in a similar vein, but I'm not sure we have the answer here, sort of combining the last two questions. Ken says, I remember a long time ago, you mentioned there was a Mac app that could scan words from a picture. Yep, and that's, PDF pen could do that. I won't go into details, but I have a lot of trouble reading. So I use my iMac to speak the text to me. Some sites or Mac apps don't allow me to select the words because there is not text, just an image. Do you know of an app that could help me scan the words on a site or on an app so I can select the words so my Mac can speak them to me? So I think we're, I'm going to, we had this come in a month or so ago and I've still not come up with an answer. So I'm throwing this out as a geek challenge. You know, essentially we want on the fly OCR, optical character recognition, on the fly OCR of a picture and off the top of my head. I don't know of anything to do that, but I like the idea and it seems like you wouldn't be the only one that would want to take advantage of this. So if anybody knows, feedback at mackeycab.com is the way to get in touch with us. You said it, brother. Feedback at mackeycab.com. Well, I said feedback at mackeycab.com. So, you know, whatever, either one, it's fine. They all work. All right. One last one here in the photos realm, John. This one from Daniel and Daniel asks he says, I'm getting caught that every time I launch photos I get this intro screen that says what's new in photos and offers to give me a tour and then says get started. So I thought maybe it was a permissions issue on the app on my Mac but when I do a get info on photos I see that the system has read and write, wheel has read only, everyone has read only and then also everyone has custom privileges which is interesting. Yes. That ain't right. That ain't right. I don't think that's right. So I'm looking at this on my Mac and I have actually exactly the same thing, John. Yeah, what do you have? Doesn't seem right. Okay. Everyone custom, system, read and write, wheel, read only, everyone read only. Cool. Great. And he tried adding himself as a, you know, permissions there and it didn't seem to change anything. I don't think so here's, here, I have a thought and my thought is if you create or use and if you don't have one, create one now so that you have one when you need it create a test user account that's an admin user. Don't forget the password.  Not going to install stuff into it. But log into that account. Now, the first time you open photos, it is going to tell you what's new in photos. Great. Let it do that. Maybe even add a photo in just to like add something to your library. Quit it. Re-launch it. See if it still happens. My guess is that it will not. My guess is that this is something in your user account, not application specific. If you're, you know, by using this test account you can definitively answer that question. And then once you know the answer, then you can start looking in places like, you know, home library preferences for, you know, photos preferences and maybe there's something corrupt out there that is causing the issue. And the way I would test for that is go and look for, so if we look in home library where's my library folder, preferences not preference pains and then I always sort this alphabetically and I look, I would look for com.apple.photos something and so I'm looking there and I see a com.apple.photos.plist with photos not launched I would move this out of the way, like just put it on my desktop then relaunch photos, see what happens, you know, and then quit relaunch again and see if you get that message. This would be the way to, to troubleshoot that at least one way. What do you think, John? Could be a launch services issue. It could. That's for sure. Yep. Yeah, and how do you fix that? I'll tell you how you fix that one way you can do that is you can fix it with Onyx. Oh, yeah. Yeah, man. Look here. Under. Yeah, some of the, okay, so it's so Onyx maintenance rebuilding and there's a checkbox next to something called launch services and that's a database that one thing I believe that database does is the first time you launch an app it'll warn you that you're doing that. Right. But I'm wondering if it's also responsible for it thinking that it's being launched for the first time every time. That could be that could be I like it. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Cool. All right, man. Anything else on photos before we move on to our next deep dive, John? No, it pretty much does what I need. I'm really happy I moved over to iCloud Photo Library. I didn't think I needed it. I went kicking and screaming, paying a couple extra bucks. Same. I did the same thing. Yeah, I was like, I don't need this. I have, and we'll talk about it in a minute, I've got, you know, at the time it was photo station now it's moments on my Synology or I've got Google photos or I'm an Amazon Prime member like, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. And then as soon as I moved over to iCloud Photo Library, I realized I was I was wrong. You know, there are there are huge convenience benefits to iCloud Photo Library for sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I want to talk about our two sponsors and I'm going to start with Ring. Ring is man like ever since I started using Ring, I've become a huge fan. So Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer. And they say they've got over a million people using their video doorbell to protect their homes. But it's more than that. Although John and I both have the Ring video doorbell and it's awesome because you know, as I said, like the just like a couple of weeks ago we had our we had the the electrician here actually it was the electric company here to replace a pole and they rang the bell and woke us up. They were here first thing in the morning and I didn't have to race out of bed. 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Setup is super easy. You got to check this out and here's the thing. I've got a deal. You can save up to 150 bucks off of a Ring of Security kit. You can, you know, have doorbells and floodlight cams and all those things in it.  Go to ring.com slash mgg. One more time for good measure. Ring.com slash mgg, r-i-n-g dot c-o-m slash m-g-g. That is the only URL that will let you see these savings otherwise you're going to pay a lot more. So go check it out. Have fun with it. Our thanks to Ring for sponsoring this episode. Also our thanks to the folks at Bear Bones BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. Man this is a piece of software. It is running right here, right now. It's the thing I use to manipulate and manage the chapters and show notes that we have. Without BB Edit, I'm not sure what I would do. And I don't, I mean I do actually quite a bit of coding and stuff and I use BB Edit for that too because it's great. Like if I need to edit files that are part of our Git repositories, it knows how to deal with that locally. If I need to edit files that are direct on the server, it knows how to do that even though Adam yells at me that I'm not supposed to be editing things live on the server especially not code but I do it anyway and BB Edit makes it super easy for me to do that and usually I don't make mistakes and so that's good. But if I do, BB Edit has multiple like almost unlimited, I think they are unlimited levels of Undo. So if I hit save, which is all I have to do to save the FTP server, I hit save and then realize, hey look, I broke Mac Observer. Awesome. I just do a bunch of Undo's and then I hit save again and look, I fixed Mac Observer. Whoo, I'm the savior. So BB Edit makes it super easy to do that plus you can do things just like counting words and finding differences in text and you can even invoke BB Edit from the command line just by you have to install their command line tools but that comes with BB Edit and then you just do BB Edit, space, file name, good to go. Check it out, go to barebones.com download your free trial of BB Edit and in fact you can do all the things I just talked about with the free version of BB Edit, you don't even need to buy it but I'm sure you'll want to anyway. Check it out, barebones.com Alright John let's move on to our Synology section. Sound good to you? Absolutely. Cool. Alright, I figured the way to start with Olga because this is a question I get all the time man and it is, it is this she says, I'm thinking of upgrading my Tube A Synology play and would like to get your opinion as experienced Synology users which Synology disk station should I buy? This is of course a loaded question. There are so many Synology disk stations and so many different ways of looking at how to get them that it gets a little crazy. So she tells us, she says we'll use her as sort of a case study here. I am using a Synology as a secondary backup device and also for remote access to files photos and videos. I have one wireless camera connected to it. I travel often and I like to stream home videos and photos using Synology software. I would also like to use a VPN. The primary reason I'm upgrading is that my disk station is slow. Streaming video is a pain. Photos load slowly. Do I really need to upgrade or is there something I can do to make mine work faster if I decide to upgrade to a 4B but I really need to play models with hardware transcoding and so what is the best model for my needs? So the way I look at this is you got to pick sort of the features that you need and then narrow it down and I think for most people you most of us are going to wind up using this for hardware in part anyway for streaming videos. And with that in mind Synology has some of their disk stations, the play models but not always they don't always have the play moniker but that have a hardware transcoding chip in them in addition to just the CPU so that you're not just using the CPU to do the transcoding of your videos. You've actually got a hardware chip in there that's dedicated and can just do it while keeping your CPU free to do other things. So that's one thing that you would want to do and you want to think about that. If you want to have a VPN server a lot of us probably want to do that. You want to think about that. You want to think about how big you want this to be in terms of how many drives do you want to put in there. You know you can get drives that are 12 terabytes now so know that in order to have fault tolerance which means if one drive dies you still have another and your data isn't lost one of your drives and this is there's an asterisk here because the formulas don't always work this way but essentially one of your drives will always be dedicated to fault tolerance so if you buy if you buy a 2-bay Synology and you have 2 12 terabyte drives you have 12 terabytes of usable storage. If you buy a 4-bay Synology and put in 3 12 terabyte drives using the same formula and this is true you will have 24 terabytes of usable storage right so you're only giving up one drive so you're giving up percentage wise more in a 2-bay than in a 3, 4, 5, 8 more more. So that's where I always start with this and I do tend to focus on the you know the hardware transcoding is sort of the first thing that I go with thankfully Synology has a place that you can go and compare different NAS devices and that's really where I find it super easy because you can just go to the page and select what you want and start comparing different items and life starts getting a little bit easier when you do that I think but any any thoughts on this John before I start giving specific recommendations for Olga here that's actually where I was going to go is that they have most NAS vendors have some sort of selector to you identify what you want to use it for and they try to steer you in the right direction yeah I guess the one thing I do like is this some of them so think about the future when you get a Synology the nice thing for example the one that I have several of them support an expansion chassis and you'll know that because the model will have a plus at the end of it so for example I have the DS 713 plus that means that means you can add a expansion bay so for example that's a two bay unit but I also have a two bay expansion chassis so I can put up to four drives in there so I'm well I kind of have three and a half I'll maybe describe what's happening with that well I'll tell you now another thing you consider is that you may want to set up one of the drives as a SSD cache and that's actually what I have so I have three drives and one of the drive base has an SSD in it and that's nice because it speeds things up so consider that too when you're getting one is that you can give it a little oomph by setting aside one drive bay for an SSD cache huh sure yeah and then the other thing I'm thinking if we're talking speed is that I think almost all of them support link aggregation and that you can why do I keep knocking this thing over I'm going to put it over there I got this thing here keep knocking over okay that's done but yeah a lot of them now well some of the newer ones I believe now have like most renders offer a 10 gig port instead of a gig port but also several of the models even this relatively low end one that I have here old one because it's 13 maybe 2013 but you can bond two of the two of the ether ports together to also get a little extra oomph yeah I would say for most people for most of us even John and I in our homes and to be fair I do run this link aggregation thing I would not even spend a moment's thought thinking about that when choosing your synology well I mean most of the time you know even streaming video even if you have 10 people in your house streaming video you're never going to use up your gigabit pipe and in your house the fastest pipe you most likely have is a gigabit pipe and that's your ether net really you're talking about wifi so your bottleneck is not the speed to and from your disk station right it's cool to be able to like have two disk stations talk to each other faster than that if you're backing up from we'll talk about that in a minute but beyond that I wouldn't like it's not even worth wasting an ethernet port on it to be perfectly honest you're just not going to see the benefit but the rest of the stuff for sure and I would go you know for Olga yes your speed problems are the CPU in that unit I have a very similar unit here I've got a couple of disk stations and I've got a similar unit here and it's just always slow even just launching disk station manager it just comes up much slower than any of the others and it's because those were built to be you know sort of entry level budget items to get you in and and see if it's the right thing for you without spending a ton of money and you've seen that it is you've gotten good use out of it now it's time to upgrade so I would go with either the DS418 or the DS918 plus the and they're both you know 2018 models that's where the 18 comes from even though the DS918 plus doesn't have play in its name it does have the hardware transcoding engine which makes me salivate over this one a little bit the one I have I've got a DS1817 plus which does not have the hardware transcoding engine so I'm stuck with the CPU now it's a quad-core CPU and it does okay but it would do better if it had the hardware transcoding engine so the 918 plus has that the RAM makes a huge difference on synologies and the 918 comes with 4 gigs of RAM but both of these are expandable the 418 play comes up comes with two and I will put a link to compare these two in the show notes so you can easily easily see them but you know the 918 plus is a nice looking unit there it's got the plus so as you just informed me I had no idea that's what the plus meant but it's expandable which is cool both of these do link aggregation and they will serve you quite well I think so I would I always like the moment I get a synology I expand the RAM to the maximum that it can take because I've found it makes such a huge difference both in the responsiveness of it but also in the just the transfer speeds it definitely makes good use of all that RAM and to rewind back to episode 717 their hardware transcoding engine John it supports H.265 the Apple the high efficiency video yeah I know it's pretty good yeah I don't just you know I didn't know this for the longest time until I went to one of their events and I'm like what do all the numbers mean yeah just to get it out of our system here yeah so ds means this station right they do have some others now RT for the first number is the number of bays and then the last two numbers are the year that it was released and then the plus is means that you can expand it to that number so for example mine is a 713 it's 2 bays but I can add a 5 bay which adds up to 7 so that's that's how you decipher that so why does the 1817 plus have a 1 after ds do you know that answer 1817 yeah it's an 8 bay unit and the 1517 is a 5 bay unit well I must be able to go up to that I think it can it can scale up I think that's the answer that's right yeah yeah but the ds 1817 I don't think the plus means expandable John because I'm comparing the ds 1817 to the ds 1817 plus and the difference is a 1.7 gigahertz CPU versus a 2.4 gigahertz CPU and the ability to support an m.2 SATA SSD cache instead of dedicating a dry bay to it so I don't think the plus means what we think it means no I think it does I mean I'm looking at the description of the product right in front of me and it says ds 1817 plus and one of the bullets scales up to 18 drives correct and the ds 1817 also has that bullet without the plus now that's what I thought about yeah I don't know I don't know the answer it's crazy man it's crazy but that so this is this is why it's so common to get the question what's the right distation and you can always email us and we're happy to kind of guide you on this you know it's actually a question we get a lot but you know going and just sort of narrowing down you know how many drive bays you want and looking at the CPU and looking at the hardware video transcoding engine that that's sort of the three big ones to start with and and it focuses down from there so that's that's the that's how I always start and that has not served me nor anyone that I've advised wrong thus far just like figure out what you need and you know and go from there so but that 918 plus that's a that's a really attractive one these days you know we and we will spend more time talking about Synology they are they are not the only vendor out there there really are two other big ones Drobo that makes their N series NAS right that that are network capable or N series units that are network capable all NAS is our network capable NAS it means network attached storage so so there's Drobo out there and then there's QNAP QNAP and Synology they must have like shared some foundation together because their software is very similar the names of their packages are all very similar and and the way things work is is a little more it's very it's a very similar experience especially when you compare to Drobo which is like not web based it's you know you have to run an app and the the the big benefit and really kind of the big hold back for me to Drobo is the third party app support for it is very very minimal it's getting better though like they've got the right leadership in place now so I think I think we'll see good things out of them but for Synology and QNAP there's you know the supports huge and very there's a long history of it too but thing for me is that QNAP really seems more focused on the enterprise Synology certainly is focused on the enterprise but also very focused on the home and so I've always liked Synology a little better for the home than QNAP although you know there are there are some benefits like their transcoding engine and their CPUs and the QNAP stuff blows away some of the Synology so it is worth looking at like something like the QNAP you know the TS 451 plus is it's a 4 bay unit and really it's quite a beast in terms of kind of the way it all works together so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too I think yeah I think our only minor we haven't paid as much attention to QNAP as we probably should because they don't really do anything beyond standard raid last I checked which that's correct yep and that and it's frustrating yeah so by that what John means is you know in my example before I said we got 3 12 terabyte drives in this 4 bay unit well that's great A if you can afford 12 terabyte drives and B if you're buying all your drives at once but if you're not buying all your drives at once then what you have is a scenario where you might have drives of different sizes in the same unit QNAP will only see drives that are the same size and let's say you have a bunch of 3 terabyte drives and then you add a 5 terabyte drive it will only see 3 terabytes on that drive until all of your drives are 5 terabyte drives whereas Synology as soon as it can it will start seeing more of that space on your other drives as you expand and put things in so you can have and use mixed size drives in Synology you cannot in QNAP you also can have mixed size drives in Drobo too just to make that clear that's uh right right we'll get on that okay cool uh let's see so where are we here let's oh yeah Lewis great so Lewis kind of has the follow up question to to Olga's which Synology should I get he says uh I'm trying to stream actually it's Louis sorry sorry Louis I'm trying to streamline and simplify my tech life by evaluating if I really need all the hardware and services that I own and manage I already own a Synology NAS for quite a while now and I'm debating buying a new one to replace it to replace several services I use he says Dropbox is one he says I understand you might lose some of the sharing functionality in terms of how easy it is to share but I get all of the private cloud stuff with the Synology and number two he says back plays does not back up my network drives so how are you backing up Synology files really what he's asking is what are all the things that I can do with my Synology once I get it which is a great question and so he started with you know private cloud we'll call it file syncing right Dropbox private Dropbox is really the right way to kind of conceive of it since I think we all understand what Dropbox is and if we don't it's the way of syncing folders between your multiple devices but when you do that with Dropbox or like you said when we're in the photo section you know one one drive or box dot com you're syncing with someone else's server with Synology they called it cloud station and now they're calling it Synology Drive but it's essentially the same thing you are syncing with your own server and the nice part about that is you don't pay anybody a monthly fee for extra storage and no one else has access to your data and I use Synology Drive I've used cloud station for a long time and then when it switched over to Synology Drive I made that switch with it and it's fantastic I don't worry or think about how much space I'm taking up I don't worry who has access to my data and I can sync when I'm local I can sync when I'm remote and it just works I love it do you use Synology Drive John? No but I do use their cloud station server so that's it cloud station backup oh that's different okay yeah yeah yeah right okay so that's that's their their own backup engine that's right yep which you can also do right and so you run instead of running or in addition I think but to running time caps time machine on your Mac you run cloud station backup the app on your Mac and that backs up your Mac to your your Synology is that right? I backup a subset okay so I use that to backup my documents got it use time machine to backup the entire drive just for space reasons yeah of course of course wow very cool okay and that works well their Mac app for that feels like a first-class citizen on your Mac and all that stuff right I mean there's not much to it I mean it basically just you know either get a file browser if you want to restore stuff or yep or it just tells you what the latest thing that it synced okay cool yeah there's really not much to it I mean I see its icon in the menu bar I'm never terribly interested in what it's doing because anytime you look at you know it'll show you it says you know last updated and it's typically you know minutes ago that's good that's good cool so that's you know those that's sort of the first big thing videos either using their own video station app suite of apps I should say which includes apps for your iOS devices and all that where you can store videos on your Synology and then sync them down to your devices or stream them to your Apple TV or to your Macs or to your iPhone or your iPad that's you know a very popular use of your network storage device you can do it like I said with their video station suite of devices but you can also do it with Plex and I run both on mine because I can have them both point at exactly the same video library there's no is no real overlap or anything it's not like I have to store two copies of my library by and large we all use Plex in the house because we're just used to it but you know video station works you can sync stuff for offline viewing and it's very very simple and all of that stuff so but Plex will run and Plex will take advantage of the Synology hardware transcoders and they have a very tight relationship there so it like that works really really well and I love it it's great in addition they'll go ahead well one thing that I also use so they also have a thing called media server which I think is pretty similar but what I use it for I kind of so I use it to share my music using a protocol called DLNA and the thing is I happen to have a speaker in the house that understands music that's published in DLNA perfect the hios actually so the Denon hios will see a DLNA source so that's one way that I can listen to my music interesting Plex of course cool alright so that I'm trying to see where we are here oh you know we talked about some of the uses for home oh another big one is VPN you can set up a VPN server on your disk station and use that as a VPN server when you're out and about to get access not only to your disk station but anything on your home network and you can configure that and control it and again the nice part is it is your server you are connecting to your network and all of that stuff and it supports various types of VPNs that you can use on your iPhone and your Macs and it works very very well very reliable well we use Synology's VPN on their router now but for a long time we used it on their disk station and I think you use yours on the disk station right John and you know there's surveillance station which Olga alluded to because you can have your Wi-Fi cameras linked up to this and surveillance station is pretty cool it allows you to kind of take all kinds of different webcams they need to be open source or openly addressable webcams so a lot of the you know specific ones like you can't link your ring stuff with it and you can't link your drop cam with it I don't think can you link you can't link your drop cam with it but you can buy you know like there's this FOSCAM camera that I have that I use with it that I have aimed at Hector's Cage and it's it has a motor in it and I can control it and move it up and down and swivel side to side and all that stuff and it works great it's like an $80 camera or something and you can create your own they call it surveillance station but you can use it to monitor security whatever you want to do and again the nice part is you're not streaming that data to some cloud service you're storing it on your own so that whole privacy thing comes right back up and then and then there's the stuff for offices and for business I think we've all used you know google docs on the web or iCloud you know you got pages and numbers and stuff that you can do on the web well Synology has Synology Office like your own privately hosted google docs the web interface is stellar it doesn't feel really any it doesn't feel like you're missing anything that google docs has we use it for a couple of the businesses here and it's awesome like we just don't even think about it anymore in fact one of the guys was like wait you're hosting this in your office I said yeah it's like holy crap on what I said well just my little disk station it's like that's amazing and it is amazing it's really really well done and pretty lightweight like I don't see a lot of CPU load on it from my you know stuff there's only a few of us using it at any point in time but we've got some documents we're updating constantly and it just you know works great and everybody sees the updates because it's all right there on our web browsers and and all that stuff so so that works well they've got a thing called note station and then apps for the mac and your iOS devices it's like an evernote clone and John this morning when evernote wouldn't let us sync notes between us and actually evernotes telling me it's not syncing notes between us now I'm thinking maybe we should move over to note station man it's ironic that I'm reading this note out of evernote but there you go and they've got a chat thing that's kind of like slack again you just host on your own so you're not worrying about storage space and and paying monthly fees and then you know you can do other things on it well they have Synology moments which is it automatically you can put an app on your phone to sync all your photos to it and then it indexes your photos automatically categorizes them date, time, location and faces and yeah it does facial recognition and instead of Apple's crazy thing where it makes your mac and your iPhone and your iPad all do separate facial recognition on device well Synology does it on the server where it's supposed to be done and you still have the same privacy because it's all your data so it's pretty cool and then you know there's like you can use it for bit torrenting stuff there's a lot of people that you know use like transmission or Synology's download station to download torrents and for those of you that are downloading torrents that maybe you don't want to have to have a conversation with your ISP or your Synology to connect to a VPN server on it's outbound connections so all of that stuff is private and all of that you'd have to get a third party VPN server obviously for that but yeah those are the so there you go if that didn't wet your appetite then a NAS probably isn't for you I would think and all of these same things are doable on the QNAPS most of them some of them I'll say are doable on the Drobo a lot of the office related stuff is not I don't think it'll do a VPN server I don't think it'll do VPN outbound and I don't think it'll do the photo stuff in that way but it will do Plex so there's that I don't think it does personal cloud either so there you can see some of the limitations of why we this is why we keep coming back to Synology right Drobo has the right infrastructure but not all the apps QNAP has all the apps but you have to use drives of the same size Synology it's the best of both worlds so that's why we keep coming back to that right good yeah I think so I think it's great I think it's fun too I like this I mean the only thing I will say about Synology is that sometimes accomplishing certain tasks I mean they keep getting better so right now I believe the latest version of their software which they call DSM is at 6.2 and they keep improving it but accomplishing some things you may have to do it in a round about manner that's not necessarily straightforward I'll give you that yeah for sure it does a lot more but it's also more complex to negotiate certain things like for example setting up to do a time machine yeah you got to be you got to go to like two or three different places in order to get that to work the way that you want it's totally true I've always said there is no such thing as a novice NAS device in that you could be a novice but when you buy a NAS that's sort of the thing that makes you not a novice anymore I mean you're at some level you're going to be you know managing your network now in a more hands-on way for your home but there's all these cool things that you can do and it's not terribly difficult right but I agree with what you're saying John that it's just it's like well it's like anything that you have to learn how the user interface works and Synology's is not quite as intuitive as say the MAC is but it's not terrible either it's not terrible yeah yeah and a few others to mention so and I consider these guys NAS vendors but WD makes some multi-drive units that will perform cloudy stuff and raid type stuff yes they are technically NAS devices very feature feature set limited right like they do they are not built to be all-purpose devices they are like let's sync your photos and your videos and your files and nothing else and that's fine it'll let you do a basic raid it'll give you basic redundancy a lot of them so I wouldn't count them out it depends on what you need to do the thing is that the Synology I would say almost does too much well it can be overwhelming we've been using other guys yeah well I was gonna say we've been using Synology's here for what five years and there are still things that it's like oh I had no idea I could do that oh cool great fun yeah so alright let's talk about backups you kind of open that door John and and so we will we will kick it open and Bruce Bruce will start us down this path but we've got quite a few questions that'll kind of I think probably wrap up the episode with this which is great he says in previous episodes you I heard you mentioned having a drive array at pilot Pete's house as an offsite backup for your drive array and also the reverse setup for pilot Pete I've been thinking about doing something similar with one of my sons-in-law and I wondered how you did the network setup can you tell me how your networks are configured physical and IP at both ends to allow this to happen I'm particularly curious about how the VPN or VPNs are set up yeah so right if you have devices on either end and you want to back up to each other you need to somehow tunnel those two devices together and you could do that with a VPN but thankfully we have not had to now we've previously used crash plan as sort of the conduit to make that happen but crash plan in in that scenario is going away you can't do peer to peer crash plan anymore past like September or something so we are using our disk stations to do it and we are using a piece of software called hyper backup to make this happen and and what's cool is many disk stations have USB ports on them that you can use to attach printers you can connect it to your UPS so that it knows when the power is out but you can also connect it to an external drive so Pete's given me an external drive I've given him an external drive that we've plugged into our respective disk stations and then we use hyper backup on our disk stations to backup to each other you actually use hyper backup as the client and hyper backup vault as the server so we're each running both you know I connect to hyper backup vault on Pete's and I can save my data there it's encrypted it's my data he can't read it but it's there and you can the nice part is of course I can start it locally here and see the backup so that I'm doing not doing that across the internet and then just do the off site so hyper backup is the key to backing up data from one disk station to another and I do it with Pete but I also do it locally like I said I've got a couple of disk stations and so with extra storage I just have you know the things that I don't want to lose backed up and that's why you back them up but yeah hyper backup works great for that so have you done you have two disk stations right John so you've played a little bit with hyper backup I think you said yes so what I do redundancy is always good right yeah redundancy is always good so um so on my 713 that is well I store data on there but I also store my time machine backups but then what I do is I set up a hyper backup task to take the entire contents of that one and send it all to another one smart so in case my primary NAS totally melts down I have a full backup on the other one and I've actually done this in the past like I've had a time machine backups get corrupt well because I'm backing up my time machine file from one to the other um I've restored I've had it where for whatever reason the file gets corrupt I'm like well let me get the one from a couple days ago and see if it's okay and actually the last time I tried that it in fact did not solve the problem it was it was in the perpetual preparing backup state yeah if you've ever had that happen where it just never gets out of that state because it's just so horribly confused about everything yeah totally yeah yeah so um it's worth mentioning though that hyper backup which is their client can back up not only or I think we're going to be talking about this soon but let's talk about it now because it's right in front of me yeah go ahead yeah yeah so one of your targets can be another Synology device right which is what I just talked about so um but two other destinations that you can set up with hyper backup is one could be a remote file server using something like our sync or web dev but then also hyper backup will talk to multi many popular cloud services like Amazon Google dropbox Microsoft s3 and a few others that I have never heard of well yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna actually I'm gonna talk about those other ones because if you take a look at the list that's there um there are some that will offer you not insignificant amounts of storage for free in fact I use one called hubic that I had never heard of before hubi capital C oh yeah yeah and I'm backing up to hubic every day and I think they give me 25 gigs for free so I've got yeah so I found like 20 gigs of data like you know my top 20 essentially and it's like yep off it goes and it works out great and another one that's out there is Synology C2 backup um and now that's available in the US you can use it um or it's available to users worldwide I think their data center is in I want to say it's in Germany which is great because Germany has awesome privacy laws but um but yeah you can use Synology C2 and backup to that too and I and in many ways I think it's less expensive than a lot of the others so and C2 I mean it's been working so well for me it's just crazy so I back up to that every day too so yeah hubic so yeah hyper backup is awesome for all of those things like you said John yeah it's I mean it's the name is appropriate because it just does everything which I think is great so cool you got anything else John on this one not for that so yeah the one thing that I mentioned before is that so setting up time machine gets weird because you got to set up quotas for the user that you identify as the time machine user yeah it is that got kind of weird from my my perspectives and maybe I didn't do it but but the way I did it is that so I create one user so I created a user called uh mac mini backup and then I created another user called macmo pro backup yes and then um I set them up with a quota and you can do this under most operating systems and so you know I as a guideline I think for most time machine you want to allocate twice the amount of space that um to give you some breathing room you want to allocate twice the amount of space that you typically take up on the drive or at least that's what I do yep so here's here's the issue right time machine will take up all of the store eventually take up all the storage that you let it right that that it can see and so the problem is if you've got you know you've got your 12 terabyte volume you probably don't need 12 terabytes of of time machine and more importantly you probably had some other ideas about what you might want to do with those 12 terabytes of storage so you want to carve out a section of it for time machine and the way Synology has set up to allow you to do that Drobo by the way makes this super easy you just say what do you want your time machine volume called and what do you want the maximum space it's allowed to use to be and then it you just tell it you know and it does it and you point to that volume and it takes care of it Synology doesn't make it quite that easy and the way they solve it is what you just described John which is there um using quotas you set a different user up and each user has a quota so you set up Mac mini backup and you say give it you know X amount and then no matter where you choose to store your backup that particular user can't ever use more than that amount of storage and that keeps time machine in check so yeah it's a little wonky they've got a knowledge base article about how to set that up with screenshots and everything so I'll put a link to that in the show notes but you're right yeah it's a little it's a little wonky the first time you go through it it's like oh it's more about understanding the paradigm right is what you know oh this is how we accomplish this okay different ways to skin a cat so yeah yeah nice if they could just make a little yeah wizard to do it I agree it's like okay name the user how much space and then you know just create it for you in the background yep yep maybe we do that in the next version maybe um so both Todd and Mark had asked the same question which is how to clone or can I clone to a Synology right because we always talk about maintaining a clone using something like super duper or a carbon copy cloner and can you use your Synology as a destination for your clone and the answer is absolutely yes but there's a caveat and the caveat is that you're going to be backing up to a disc image on your Synology because that's the way you do that and you're not going to boot from a disc image so if your goal was to have a bootable clone that could connect to any Mac then this is not the way to do it but if you just wanted to create a clone and you're okay with the limitations of it being a disc image then by all means this is the way to do it and I actually do this to create archives of things like before I upgrade to Mojave or before if I'm going to do a nuke and pave it's like let me clone this and like put it in cold storage here so that it's I'm never going to touch it but here's how that drive existed and that has saved my butt in the past in fact I started doing those kinds of things at no less frequently than once a year just like cold storage here's the entire image of the drive great if this machine dies or if I delete something I know I can go back and maybe get it so that's that's where so yes you can but yes John I just thought of something no let me ask you this so normally a clone has to be a direct connected drive right I know I think I know where you're going I like this keep tug on this yeah yeah yeah could I do a net boot to a disc image because isn't that what's really happening when you do a net boot yes except I don't think you can do it to a disc image on a sonology but you might be able to well could you do it to an eye scuzzy image right so thus far we've been talking about the sonology as a file server right where it manages its own storage and then just you know displays to you files and so when we talk about cloning to a disc image there we're talking about you're connecting to the sonology using like file sharing like you would between two Macs so it's either using probably SMB nowadays that you know this the new way of doing it but it could be using Apple file protocol you can turn on both if you want but there is another way you can carve out a segment of your storage and present it as just raw data to your Mac using a protocol called I SCSI and your Mac doesn't support that natively though which is why I'm pretty sure you can't boot from an eye SCSI partition but it is treated like a partition to your Mac once you put an eye SCSI driver on your Mac you then can just grab like you could say okay great here's you know four terabytes of data and you can just grab that and you'd format it as I don't know if you could format it as APFS but maybe but you'd format it as a HFS plus which I've done in the past and then your Mac is just searching it directly so in theory bootable but I don't know can you net boot from Synology? I'm not sure man but that's an interesting thought process I don't know have you found anybody that's done it? No I'll have to I'll have to search to try in theory oh at least in my mind yeah I like it there's a link in the Synology forums about bringing a net boot slash net install package to Synology and so I will put that that thing but yeah as KiwiGram points out in the chat room hello that eye SCSI doesn't mount as a network volume right it is a direct it appears to macOS like it's a direct attached device so you're not sharing it with anyone it's just like a hard drive that you've got connected via USB or whatever if you wanted to share it you'd share it from your Mac not from your disk station which is just interesting so yeah this is I don't know man I like this idea speaking of file systems where are we on time okay this is a good way to wrap this up here speaking of file systems there are two that you can use now on Synology actually there's more than two but there's there's sort of two main ones for years and years and years EXT4 was the file system to use and then starting a couple of years ago Synology changed their default file system for most of their nas devices to BTRFS this is very similar to what we're talking about between HFS Plus and APFS on the Mac it's a very similar conversation right and a lot of the features of BTRFS with snapshots and all that stuff are you know are mirrored with APFS so it's a very similar conversation the one big difference that's frustrating to both John and I longtime Synology users is that there is no conversion utility to go from EXT4 to BTRFS so you have to create a new volume that is BTRFS and copy all your data over and I have not gone through this headache yet although I keep thinking about it but I have tested some like I've mentioned I have a couple of different Synology units my main one is still EXT4 because that's just where it is but all the others are BTRFS and it it runs fine although I will point out that QNAP has an article where they make it very clear they do not think BTRFS is the right file system now I don't know how much of this is just propaganda versus facts well it is propaganda it also has facts BTRFS they say is slower greater IO latency and that EXT4 is like 60% faster which is totally true because they include what else they have self healing I mean there's these advanced features kind of like APFS and I think you have the same case with APFS is that the performance is not yet at the same level I think even Synology certain models won't run it because it requires too much horsepower too much horsepower yeah that's exactly right so it's worth looking through this if you're interested in that we'll put a link to that in the show notes but it's pretty interesting it just makes me sad I mean come on Apple can write a utility to convert from one to the other Synology people should be able or hire Apple to do it for you Synology could do it too I mean there's smart people there just like there are everywhere but yeah there you go so I mean I may do it one day I mean like I said I fully back up one to the other the thing is I'm nervous about erasing everything and then oh my backup was not complete yeah the way I would do it is I would like back it up or clone it or however you need to get the data over to the new partition and I would do that on a second disk station and get that up and running and all of that and then here's a cool trick especially going all the way back to where we started this segment with Olga if you have say a 2-bay Synology and you upgrade to a 4-bay you can take the 2 drives out of that 2-bay and put them into that 4-bay and then add to that and it will inherit all of your settings and it's your same deal which is why I'm still on EXT4 even though I keep upgrading to different units so you definitely could do this by migrating to another unit temporarily and then just take your disks and put them back in make sure you keep the right order otherwise it's not happy but disk 1-1, disk 2-2 disk 3-3 then you could do that so that would be the other way to do it it just feels like a it's like anything it's just a headache and you know it's how we go I don't know I do know that it's time to bring the band in my friend we wanted to tell our tales of woe our NAS tales of woe we'll save that for later we'll have to save our NAS tales of woe for another day you and I both recently had NAS drive meltdown or failures yeah they happen all the time it's just like it's part of life with the you know I mean their drives they just they die that's how it works it's why we store our data in in these things with fault tolerance so that when the drive dies we're not losing data it's really not a big deal it's really not a tale of woe right it's hey a drive died I pulled it out I replaced it with another one it the world's good again yay I think I've only had two failures on my synology one maybe two on my Drobo yeah I hadn't had many yeah they happen though I mean you know it's never if it's when right so oh yeah and I like I have mine set up you can say how many bad blocks before you tell me about it and I set it to one yes tell me right away yes because one once one block goes so where do you where do you do that and storage manager John is that right yeah I think it's storage okay yeah I think storage manager you highlight the drive and then you say here's the a black bad block threshold really so I got a configure oh no that's not there I don't know every most storage manager I'm gonna click on a drive let's click on this one let's say health info huh it's buried in there somewhere okay under the the drive this is no configure all right so yeah so so hard drive then I click on the drive then I click on no that's not it all that's I was just gonna say it configures not it test schedule no logs general maybe it's general ah there we go yeah so oh look at that in the general tab you can say send me a healthy disc health report okay sector warning disc life span warning for these only yeah and the smart database look at that so yeah I said it to one I think it's off by default so it's something no mine is on and is set to 50 so maybe 50 is the default so I'll set mine to one high yeah I agree yeah I want to know when this thing is gonna start to go bad so cool all right well there you go folks thank you thank you for listening thanks everybody for everything we love being able to do this and we really appreciate your help and all of that stuff a big shout out thanks to all of our premium subscribers at mackeycup.com premium if you're interested in that we'll have a long list of you to thank when we get back and go through the long list because we're recording this in advance so we can't do the list because we don't know the future yet but now we're in the future but we didn't know you understand premium at mackeycup.com is where all of you who are premium members can email us of course you can call us 224-888-Geek and John Geek is 4-3-3-5 and visit our mackeycup forums go to mackeycup.com we'd love to hang out with you over there good quality answers good quality folks and it's growing and we love to see it and we really it's fun being able to do all this together and I want to thank CashFly C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com for providing all the bandwidth of course I want to thank our sponsors like I said barebones.com ring.com slash M-G-G smile smilesoftware.com linkedin.com slash M-G-G maxsales.com codeweavers.com slash M-G-G John what uh what do you got to say any advice for them for me for you you're gonna be traveling soon I think I got some good advice for everybody is set your bad block count to one whether it's on your hard drive or your brain because if you don't you may get caught


Welcome everyone to this next session so lovely that everyone's here and found a way to the space and it's all about pathways to learning and open collaboration to support the online pivot and I'm very pleased to be able to hand over now to Rob Farrow to hear all about his project. Thank you very much. This is exciting, I've never been on TV before. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm Rob Farrow and I'm a senior research fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. I work on the Open Education Research Hub and its portfolio of projects including GOGN, the network for doctoral students but today I'm here to talk about a project which involved a wider group of colleagues at the OU but there's still an openness angle and an openness connection and I'm going to explore that with you today. So you'll see here I've put my name and et al. The reason for doing this is not to try and claim the credit for what other people have done but to just reflect the fact that there's 18 co-authors on this research and it involved a lot of people working on different discrete parts of it. I saw this tweet last night I thought it was kind of apt but also we didn't spend years on this research this was a very much an agile quick turnaround project and the context for that was very much the 2020 pandemic. So the project in question is called Pathways to Learning and was funded by the GCRF that's the Global Challenges Research Fund and it was set up as a collaboration between the Open University in the UK and the African Council for Distance Education and what we did was rapidly develop two courses specifically for audiences in Africa one which was a program for teacher education and one which was a program for tertiary educators and both of these courses were available openly so anyone could sign up for them and take them and they're presented on the Open Learn platform which is the Open University's OER repository and through July and August last year over six weeks we ran this very quickly developed pair of courses and we did that by using material already produced by the OU both in terms of core provision but also from edtech research projects and sort of tried to find the things that could be appropriated most easily and kind of most agilely in a way. So when I go through the rest of this I'm just going to invite you to reflect on some things which I'm sure we've been reflecting on anyway. All educational institutions have had to make some changes in response to the pandemic obviously those are up for distance education and have some advantages in some ways and the long-term impact remains to be seen. Most people are predicting some changes to the world of work and to the world of education but one thing I'd like to invite you to reflect on while I'm talking is the role of openness in this kind of thing because you could have a sort of rapid agile COVID response but it need not look like an open response so I'm going to explore a bit of that in this but I just invite you to sort of consider that as I go ahead. So why do this work? The idea was that a need had been identified in north and sub-Saharan Africa for professional educators to have access to fresh and development specifically targeted around online and blended education and involved in the UK side at the Open University we had representatives from Wales which is the Faculty of Wellbeing Education and Language Studies, IET the Institute of Educational Technology which is Warren based, the International Development Office which runs a number of development projects in the Global South, the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sports and then on the African side you have the African Council for Distance Education, Centre for Research and Distance and Online Learning in Lagos, Nigeria, National Open University of Nigeria, the Open University of Tanzania and the University of South Africa. So the idea was to produce something very quickly, roll it out very quickly and evaluate it very quickly so although there was a sort of history of collaboration and there have been a number of ed tech and OER projects in Africa by the OU so there was some you know groundwork already in place there was some networks already in place but everything had to be done quite quickly so we all know that the pandemic has created a drive to move education online a lot of it was maybe happening already anyway and just catalyzed but we know the sorts of challenges that are associated with this kind of thing and in this case we didn't necessarily know who'd be taking the courses that wasn't you know that clear at the start and we also knew that bandwidth and access to technology and and to data would be potentially an issue and so what are we offering we have these OERs these free courses already there and we have expertise in distance education and training educators but also on the tech and delivery side innovation in platforms and the way we sort of deliver learning so the real kind of rationale for this work was how can we make the most of these free and open resources that we have to meet the needs of those practitioners in Africa so two courses one is the take your teaching online course which was adapted and this is aimed at people who are already teaching and to help them make a move to become an online or blended educator and that's partly on the tech side and partly on the sort of practice side and kind of how you approach what you're doing so that was one of the courses that was used and the other one was this course originally developed for the TESA project teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa and again this course was for teacher educators and if you like provides a scaffold for the courses that we were developing in the pathways project so Global Challenges Research Fund made some funding available for kind of rapid and turnaround projects in the context of the pandemic and so to meet that need the idea was to develop these two courses so one's a badged open course take your teaching online one's the TESA MOOC so these form the basis of the content that was delivered so two programs one for tertiary educators one teacher educators and the way this was set up was that you'd have a sort of core section which would be a one of open course but because the because we wanted to develop a sense of community we had two to three webinar events for each of those courses and in the range of additional activities and so this drew on expertise from across different departments in the OU to bring in specialists from different areas and have kind of focused things and we also used platforms that IETs developed for different research projects in the past as part of the offering so from our side on the design side the question is how are we going to make sure that we can deliver something consistent how do we know that we're doing this at the right level for our learners and engaging them in the way that's effective and so on and so the synchronous activities proved to be a quite a sort of important part of this so just to give you a sense of what these courses look like is the familiar 2020 Zoom meeting kind of set up for each of these weeks there would be this kind of clear distinction between here's the core stuff that we want you to work through here's the webinar here's the additional activities is a sort of community activities and so on and so essentially they're sort of MOOCs with with bolt-on bits so you've got kind of MOOC core and then you've got these kind of additional things added to it and you know you're getting you know basically experts in their particular bit coming in and delivering that section and one thing I'd note with that is that I'm not sure anyone really had an overall picture necessarily of what was going on because it's happening very quickly and people getting assigned to different different tasks in different weeks so in terms of the number of registrations 771 for the tertiary educates program 602 for the teacher educates program they came from 16 African countries with most people coming from Nigeria and Cuneo and now we were sort of maybe assuming that a lot of people might not have online teaching experience but 77% of people said they did in the pre-course survey and many had also taken part part in an online course on the student side as well and maybe surprisingly more than 10% so 11.2% had already taken some sort of free learning from the open university so I'm going to go into a bit more of the detail about the impact of this in a second but as a headline figure 62% so just below two thirds said they had a major change in the way that they do online learning as a result so looking at the enrolments you can see here for this goes from May 19 to January 21 around the time of the delivery of the pathways courses you can see here so this is just for the take your teaching online course you can see here a big jump around May and actually even though the course didn't last that long it was over by August the sort of formal presentation you can see that the the ongoing impacts of people you're taking that course continues and it's still popular this graph shows you a sort of pattern of engagement and this is from the tertiary educators so the dark blue shows you who's been ticking through the activities and saying that they've been doing them the orange shows you people who registered resume events and the turquoise or cyan shows you who attended and now what you can see is that the dark blue is fairly sort of consistent you know there's a bit of drop off which you you know probably expect with any course officially as well free and open one the orange line I think is quite interesting because you can see that more people were signing up for the zoom sessions than were actually going through the course and taking the kind of formal route through it the idea of getting a badge or certificate or whatever and quite a lot of the time the number of the people attending the new meetings is also bigger than the people who clicked through and said I'm taking this course and I'm doing all the bits so for the other course you see again pretty similar pattern of activity more people attending the events than going through the formal course so there were lots of kind of unanticipated forms of interaction and this is partly down to the sort of agile delivery of the whole thing so we had forums in open learn create telegram was a popular app in african countries for sharing stuff and communicating around the course offering people options and a bit of flexibility in terms of how they interacted with the course I think it was a pretty you know important step here there was no telegram group at the start and we created it during the course in response to demand in the evaluation around 97 percent of the people who responded suggested that they were they were either satisfied or highly satisfied with the quality of the programs that were offered that's pretty good impact on practice this is a bit more challenging maybe a bit more bit of harder standard to reach again you've got about 93 percent indicating a significant impact on their practice from taking some of the pathways courses similarly people are expecting and anticipating further change and this kind of went right across the whole board so changes in how teaching is organized and how learning is designed how it's assessed but also kind of how career progression works in an african context and whether it could be changed to make it more reliant to an online learning scenario blended learning scenario also I think quite a few people were inspired by the course to the extent that they felt like they wanted to become a champion for this kind of approach and sometimes I think because maybe there's a sort of advantage to them as a professional in you know professional development essentially but also the idea that this this can be a game changer and what I kind of you know I was only you know I was only part of this whole project not the whole thing and not leading it but the spirit of kind of an open approach was shared right across the project teams and I think that was a really important part of this exchange people listening on both sides and so on so just to give you a kind of summary of the evaluation itself so obviously the pandemic has had a big effect on on the on learning everywhere Africa is in a slightly different position than other continents over into the youth relative youth of the population but it's still having obviously a very very significant effect and that's still unfolding but what we did find is that as part of that change that's happening there are opportunities for online learning and for open forms of collaboration the evaluation data was overwhelmingly positive about the impact on people and I think a massive part of that was this sense of building confidence with the community as a whole so encouraging people to interact with each other encouraging people to explore things and to and to share their experiences with each other and with us I think that was really important part of it and you see the kind of things that you know you might expect to see improved confidence exploring new ways of doing things again you often have this issue of how do we get how do we help the people have really low confidence because the people are a bit confident can just kind of run away with these things and become you know super confident so it's encouraging when you get the people to express low confidence at the start to express a high degree of confidence and I think there was also a lot of appreciation and I think there was also a lot of appreciation for the sort of open elements of all this so firstly just giving people the chance to take these courses and to have access to this sort of experience but also the sort of extra stuff where there's a sort of generosity to that right we're not just being funded to make these courses available to you we're trying to find extra things that we can do and explore new things new ways of doing things together so flexibility and being agile were really really important parts of this and given the timeframe of the project we certainly prioritized that rather than a very very carefully worked out course design or something like that even though a lot of the stuff had been already validated and used elsewhere the thing that people the technology if you like that people are mostly interested in was really OERs and that might be sort of a bit surprising but people saw massive potential straight away with the idea of resources that you could freely share and use in your own practice so I don't really have time to go into the qualitative evidence but we've got quite a lot of it and it's all you know predominantly positive increased confidence more attentiveness to what's possible and thinking about how you can empower people through this kind of technology and through this sort of approach so I just want to say quick thank you to the project teams I'm not going to go through everyone's name just because I don't think we've got time but these are the colleagues from the open university in the UK plus the people in Africa that we collaborated with and their teams so yeah I will just say thank you very much for your attention happy to answer any questions if we've got some time hi Nashua yes so I was really going to thank you very much for that really interesting talk and to kind of point out what Nashua was saying and I was going to ask exactly that like what did you take back from the whole experience to the OU given the sheer numbers and the amount of really rich interaction you had with everyone I think we're still digesting that partly because I haven't seen anyone right so the project team has never met to discuss this project apart from just online meetings we don't necessarily get everyone so there's still a sort of dissection going on we'll be working on publications and getting this stuff out there in the usual kind of fashion but yeah I'm afraid that has yet to be sort of formally digested just because of time and the way things have worked out yeah you've achieved an incredible amount of time I'm very very impressed very impressed and there's not questions at the minute it's mostly thank yous and appreciation so if anyone has any last we're just about squeezing out a couple of minutes more the other comment that actually from ACPH OU if we bring it up from the point of view that a lot of people assume that maybe you had a lot of advantages in the OU coming into the pandemic but certainly from what I saw you did have your own challenges as well but also the number of opinion pieces that we would see that quite frankly just ignored all of your historical context and all that you had learned and contributed so that's something that's quite frustrating a lot of universities discovered online education last year yeah it was incredible it was just like you know and you guys having to come in and actually say hello so yeah so did anyone reach out or contact or um they may have done but I wouldn't necessarily be the person that they spoke with because I work on external research projects the most exclusively I wouldn't really be in the loop for that conversation anyway I think probably informally there's been quite a lot of that sort of consultation going on in all kinds of ways so hopefully this work gets out for sure I'm sure it will