Posts made by guyinpv

You guys are spot on.

The other thing to consider is when there are alternative technologies available. There are dozens and dozens of methods and services to do a sync'd folder share. So they reject the cost of Dropbox because they know I can host free NC software on a server that costs us $10/m. Heck I could probably do one of those torrent-based peer-to-peer file sync tools for completely free.

The second expectation is that no matter what we choose to go with, it will just magically work perfectly and never have issues. Because I'm IT, therefore whatever solution we choose should never have problems under my care. Doesn't matter if I buy a bicycle or an Echo or a Mustang, they should all get from A to B in a 3 second 0-60 and never have blowouts and always have room for the entire family.

Take, for example, Office. They used Office ever since buying Office 97 from the computer store all those years ago. Then they managed to spend out for 2000 and then 2007. But never all the computers, oh no, just the "Main" computers. So we had a mess of '97, 2000, and 2007 Office installed all over when I first got here.
When 2007 was really getting long in the tooth I pushed for an upgrade so everybody could have the same version. By then, MS had gone to 365. So even through all the gnashing of teeth about having to "rent" software, I finally got approved to setup O365 accounts. Oh, but ya only buy accounts for these people, and those people can share them. Garrrr! Yes I told them it's against TOS. But the point is, we couldn't get any other "Office". They rejected OpenOffice and Libre and online Google Docs, etc. They only wanted what they were used to, and now we could only get it with 365. So we had to buy it.

Similarly we are forced to buy our ecommerce products and services, shipping management tools, label hardware, hosting, etc etc.

I needed a half-decent NAS and my research ended up with the Synology. They don't tend to complain much about hardware purchases, but man do they hate having to do monthly service fees of any kind at all. Monthly fees are their kryptonite! I always try to find software and services with a lifetime license any time I come across a deal.

But when it comes to just getting a shared cloud folder, there is no clear winner in this category, nor are we used to any particular system. So it becomes purely a game of getting the cheapest thing possible, because there are so many options. And because the technology is handling such a simple/basic concept (i.e. shared folder), there aren't many reasons to think one method is any better than another. It's just, who has the best price.

But hey, the boss has a kid whose boyfriend once set up an XBOX, and they heard the Apple iCloud is nice, so of course they demand that is something we should use, based on authority. In a Windows-based company. Why is it always the boss's kid's girlfriend/boyfriend that gets to settle IT debates? Weird.

The thing is, it's not about just two people editing over each other. NC handles that with a conflict file.
The operation that keeps causing people trouble is either renaming a file, in which the old name comes back to life. Or moving a file, in which it reverses and goes back to where it was.

In some cases when they rename and move a file, we end up with the same file existing in BOTH folders. I would assume easily in this case they simply copied rather than moved, but the employee is adamant, swears under oath, they did CTRL-X and not CTRL-C to move it. They'll even say they "saw the file disappear" when they cut it. Of course, the files don't actually disappear in Windows, they just kind of turn greyed out.

So it's my word versus theirs. My insistence the software works right and they probably just copied, versus their word they swear they cut it. And guess who wins the hey-said/she-said? Not the IT dept that's for sure. Everybody blames the cloud, and by extension me, and thus I have to go find another cloud provider until we never have issues and nothing is ever broken.

Ya nothing makes sense. I can't imagine any file operations being "reversed" that aren't user-caused, except for some kind of bug in NC. A glitch in the database or some kind of operation performing maintenance?

I made sure the server met all specs and requirements, I even upgraded the VULTR box once already, performance wise it's running like a champ as far as CPU and RAM.

Last week I connected a couple computers to WebDav, and naturally I come in this morning to a big error that Windows can't connect to the network location, bla bla. I have to go troubleshoot and then delete and recreate the connection.
This is the kinda crap I'm trying to avoid, I can't have people coming in and randomly losing the whole thing. I keep stressing "robust".
I need a cloud that's built as if people actually need to use it.

When the company you work for is just a joke, you know it's time to leave.

Wouldn't I love to just demand we buy a 365 account for everybody, at the level that gives us Sharepoint, then simply force ourselves to use the system as-is and stop whining if some feature isn't exactly the way they want. Ya wouldn't that be nice.

@wirestyle22 said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@wirestyle22 said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

I came in the office this morning immediately greeted with "you need to check the cloud..." because once again, somebody claims they moved files from one folder to another, and they DID move and sync, they saw it happen, but 3 days later all the files were magically moved back to their original location.
I don't even know under what conditions something like this could happen, it's like an "undo" event or something. My thoughts are that some other computer which was maybe turned off or hadn't synced in a while, uploaded its files back? Some kind of time stamp issue? I've checked all the computer's clocks but who knows.

Wouldn't this create two files at worst? It's not going to overwrite a file or folder in a different folder

You'd think. At worst computer 2 would upload those files back to original folders, and not touch the 2nd folder where they were moved to. But nay nay.

Almost everything connected to NC is an always-on workstation. But we do have have a couple home laptops that come on every once in again. But if this were the case, we'd be dealing with dozens of messed up files, not just occasional reversals like this event.

I have never seen a reversal of anything I've ever done in Nextcloud. How many users are accessing it?

About 11 users, maybe 18 devices. NC was latest version up until 14 dropped recently. Runs on a VULTR Ubuntu box.

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@coliver said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

I'm not the one who demands we "share" O365 accounts, that was their brilliant plan to avoid $30 more a month. I'm quite tired of it really.

You may want to look at your licensing for O365 and report this to Microsoft. Generally licenses can't be shared and are per user.

And definitely not with O365. It's not a grey area at all, it's straight up theft.

I have much bigger concerns in my life then worrying over whether MS is losing out $30 a month.

And I know, I've spent most of my time on mangolassi ranting about my job, lol. But the time is coming to leave, as my side business is growing and I'm ready to do my own thing. Hopefully this year, I'm out. Hopefully within the next couple months.

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

I provide pros and cons, options, and prices, and lay out the risks. They make the decisions.

Exactly, and their responses are how they tell you how much they see the data as being worth.

It's a catch 22 though. If they decide they want to take some risk, and then bad things happen, they don't own up to it, they just attack me like "why didn't you prepare for that!"

Either way, I end up the bad guy.

@wirestyle22 said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

I came in the office this morning immediately greeted with "you need to check the cloud..." because once again, somebody claims they moved files from one folder to another, and they DID move and sync, they saw it happen, but 3 days later all the files were magically moved back to their original location.
I don't even know under what conditions something like this could happen, it's like an "undo" event or something. My thoughts are that some other computer which was maybe turned off or hadn't synced in a while, uploaded its files back? Some kind of time stamp issue? I've checked all the computer's clocks but who knows.

Wouldn't this create two files at worst? It's not going to overwrite a file or folder in a different folder

You'd think. At worst computer 2 would upload those files back to original folders, and not touch the 2nd folder where they were moved to. But nay nay.

Almost everything connected to NC is an always-on workstation. But we do have have a couple home laptops that come on every once in again. But if this were the case, we'd be dealing with dozens of messed up files, not just occasional reversals like this event.

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

I don't know how to put a price on data.

As the IT guy, it is for you to give a cost to recovery, it's up to the business to tell you how much the data is worth. They set the budget, so they had already determined the value.

I appreciate the advice of enterprise IT thinking but that's just not how I've seen it in small business. The only thing small biz owners ever do is haggle about price. Waaaa no way I'm "renting" MS Office. Waaaa no way I'm "renting" Adobe CS. Waaaa no way I want to pay a monthly fee for EVERY employee!! Waaaa what do you mean we need central management of XY service? Waaa I don't want to pay for hosting!

I provide pros and cons, options, and prices, and lay out the risks. They make the decisions. I'm not the one who demands we "share" O365 accounts, that was their brilliant plan to avoid $30 more a month. I'm quite tired of it really.

@bnrstnr said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

I came in the office this morning immediately greeted with "you need to check the cloud..." because once again, somebody claims they moved files from one folder to another, and they DID move and sync, they saw it happen, but 3 days later all the files were magically moved back to their original location.
I don't even know under what conditions something like this could happen, it's like an "undo" event or something. My thoughts are that some other computer which was maybe turned off or hadn't synced in a while, uploaded its files back? Some kind of time stamp issue? I've checked all the computer's clocks but who knows.

This sounds like somebody had their computer off for 3 days, and once they powered it on it synced their local files with the NC server, thus putting back files that were once moved/deleted/whatever... Does this sound possible? Is that how the sync client works?

That's exactly what I think. I just don't know how that is possible if NC is checking time stamps. Surely it has the knowledge to go the other way around. Telling the lagging computer to remove those files, rather than the computer putting them back.
Not only that, but why isn't NC recording that in the audit trails? It doesn't say such-and-so user moved file here. I can't find any trace of the reversal.

@donahue said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

how critical are those backups? If you needed them and lost them, do you lose more than $800?

Not that critical, at least not now. Once I start internally hosting some important data records and DBs and other LAN stuff, it will be.

@donahue said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

the cost of 2x4tb is basically the same as a single 8tb if we are talking WD red's. One drive at 8TB would be safer than 2x4tb in raid 0. You could always add the second drive and make it raid 1 later.

A year ago or more the prices were higher, not even sure there were 8TB drives at all? I think the 2TB drives were around $200 each, and the Synolgy about $400, so it was $800+ fully configured.

@ccwtech said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

Do you have a backup or do you need the data?

I do data recovery.

Thanks man, but oddly, just turning the Synology off and on again brought the stripe back to life and worked just fine until next sector was discovered bad.

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@dustinb3403 said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

I have to ask why is there an $800 limit on this system if you know how many backups you need?

In theory, this budget is either based off of the perceived value of the data and/or it defines their value of their data.

The "rule of thumb" for figuring this out is that you would spend around a quarter of the data value at max for protection. So if this was the sole protection, they'd see their data (that is specifically affected by this device) as having a value of no more than $3,200. Which is reasonable, it might be rather unimportant data that's just nice to not have to recreate.

I don't know how to put a price on data. I mean, let's say we lost our pile of vendor invoices. Well maybe there are 150 of these files. So if those were lost, we'd have to spend employee time tracking down all our outstanding orders, recreate the files, then track down all our own customer orders waiting on those products. So I don't know, that's maybe 4 people working for 3 days or so to figure that out. So let's say around $2000 of labor time. Plus if they are doing this work, then they aren't doing other sorts of work that may or may not translate to revenue, so maybe add $1000 for lost revenue perhaps?

This is all very speculative. Some data maybe can't be recovered at all, perhaps old reports or records.

Anyway, I didn't say $800 was the budget limit, I'm just saying that's what I spent at the time. My original plan was to push ALL my workstation backups to the NAS, which would have surpassed a RAID1 4TB mirror. Hence the stripe originally. Plus acting as backup for the server which wasn't holding anything important, I was just going to store some snapshots of the VMs.

All that to say, I never ended up putting workstation backups on it, and it became more of a general purpose network sharing NAS, and so I'm only using about 1.2TB.

You can imagine, since the NAS become general purpose, it wasn't classified as a backup device any more, but a primary device! So now it needed backed up as well. I bought a 4TB USB drive and that's when I tried to backup the NAS to the USB and it started failing and all this went down.

Here is the odd part, ONLY when the Hyper Backup tool does a backup does it start finding bad sectors. But if I use a tool like Robocopy and just copy all the files manually, no failures. What gives?

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@dustinb3403 said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

Ah so you actually have two disks with 4TB each and went with the "I need more space" RAID0.

The fix here is bigger disks and RAID1 in that case, it's going to be slow (being 5400 RPM) but at least you have the protection you were looking for.

Granted this is backup only.

I'm guessing he didn't buy the drives, but already had them.

I did buy them new, but the Synology case itself was expensive too. WD REDs at 4TB * 2 just hit the budget. The whole thing was like $800+.

I can get buy with RAID1 and 4TB drives for a while. As a backup, I might not get 5 full backup sets or whatever but it will do with some incrementals.

@brrabill said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

Our account level of O365 doesn't include Sharepoint, just 1TB of OneDrive space.

What are you on the "Business" plan?

Maybe it's worth upgrading someone to the $4 a month more plan and getting a sharepoint site.

Just one user? Or all users need higher plan to get it?

@harry-lui said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

The NAS has 2 x 4TB WD Red drives. I'm running them striped since I wanted more space and perhaps speed.

...

SATA drives speed > 1 Gbps, there was no speed advantage. Since you didn't need the space, all you did was add risk by running RAID 0.

Yes it was risk. The NAS was originally just going to be an external backup for the server. I only used RAID 0 for the combined space which is close to the what my server has which uses RAID 10 and 4 drives.

Frankly I just thought it would be more robust. I mean, I know it "can" fail, just didn't think it would be within a year. I also know my car tires can get blowouts, but I don't expect one every month or two either.

I'll probably replace this WD Red now it's at 39 bad sectors. Redo the RAID with a mirror instead. I'll lose the space but I don't expect to use up 4TB soon anyway.

So I was checking out WebDAV, I have one connected on a Win7 computer and one on Win10.
Except for the Win10 not connecting until I changed registry entries, they are both connected, but no file locks. In fact this appears to be a big deal in NC still:
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/webdav-lock-on-file-doesnt-work/21451
https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/1308
https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/83#issuecomment-377030532

Then some people have problems with the default Win10 WebDAV client:
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/windows-10-and-webdav-access/9091
Not sure what's going on here.

On top of that, whenever I open a MS Office documents, it prompts for credentials every.single.time.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27213603/How-to-stop-webdav-from-prompting-for-credentials-when-accessing-a-public-internet-based-webdav-site.html

That's annoying, boss would never allow this ridiculous extra step.

So is WebDAV the answer? Kinda meh on that right now. Sure it's not doing local sync, which saves some drive space, but we can't do any work if offline, and annoying prompts, and still no file locks, so really of little benefit it seems. Unless there is a better server than NC which has better support for file locks.

@black3dynamite said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

Or secondly, completely change to Google Docs or MS online and tell people to edit docs in the browser, because they support multiple users editing at once. That's never going to happen though.

Why not? The users don't want use a browser to work on documents? Cost to much?

Does anybody like working on documents entirely in the browser? Besides MS docs, how would you work on other stuff like Photoshop files, CAD files, flowcharts, any other doc types, those would still require to download/do work/upload which is not an enjoyable process compared to just opening a folder with a shortcut on the desktop and then double-clicking a file.
Plus they lose all the local computer shortcuts for renaming and moving files around, creating them etc. They have to learn a whole new series of tasks for working with files in the web.

If that were the only choice, then sure, but it's not the only choice. There should be such a thing in existence called a file sync tool. And there are such things. I'm trying to find one that works solid.

@obsolesce said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

Have you tried SharePoint via O365?

Our account level of O365 doesn't include Sharepoint, just 1TB of OneDrive space.

@jaredbusch said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@dashrender said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@coliver said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@dashrender said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@coliver said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@dashrender said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@jaredbusch

@irj said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@irj

@irj said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

I use NC and love it like everyone else. However for this scenario, Office online and one drive is the best tool for what you are trying to accomplish.

It's simple, easy to use and requires very minimal training since the company is already likely utilizing office . It functions just like the desktop versions in every way and makes file sharing extremely easy.

When I tested with OneDrive over a year ago, it wasn't syncing files the way we need. It wasn't letting us sync to desktop any shared folders. I believe it might be able to do this now, I'd have to test again.

We do have Office365 but we don't have accounts for every user individually. Some of our office computers are shared and so multiple people might be working under the same user.

I personally have my own O365 business account for my home business and I've found it to work pretty well although I don'y have any shared folders with other people.

I feel like it's been only a couple months since I scrubbed onedrive off all our computers cause it wasn't working right. Feels wrong to go right back to it again. What a pain.

One Drive Sharing in itself should be sufficient. If I create a file, I can share with certain users or everyone and they are able to see it under "Shared with Me" directly under their OneDrive.

If it is shared in OneDrive, then why copy it to a network shared folder? That doesnt really make any sense? I can understand copying it locally of course, but why the need for it to be in a shared folder?

Btw that is very bad practice to share accounts like that, which I am sure you already know.

To my knowledge (tested about a year ago), OneDrive folders when shared could not be synced to local computers. It would only sync your own folders. This may have changed but local computer sync simply couldn't be done back when I used it.

I'm not doing a second copy to a local shared folder. I simply want local sync period. Obviously if our share becomes a lot larger than 11GB, it will begin to make more sense to not sync absolutely everything. But the folder isn't growing that fast so I'll wait for that day.

Syncing 11 GB just seems like a horrible situation. How do these system deal with file locks?

I'm in your same exact boat. If I want to move to LANLess, I'm going to have to break my users away from a general sync'ed drive - at least in my mind. Sync your personal files, but the central shared filestore - that's likely going to have to go on a checkout like basis with SharePoint or maybe NextCloud - but it will require re-education of users on how to use it.

Modern SaberDAV (the WebDAV server that NextCloud uses) can handle file locks similar to Sharepoint. WebDAV is a transitional technology in my mind but it does a fantastic job of it.

Offline access is the real issue. Apps that understand how to natively talk to something like NC (is that a thing?) or OneDrive or SharePoint seems to really be the future. You open the app, the app has direct access to the data in question.

The problem comes in when you need/want offline access. How do you set it up at an app level for online syncing?

Hence why I called WebDAV a transitional technology. It's good for the applications that can't directly access the date on the webserver. By the way Office natively uses WebDAV to access files on Sharepoint and Onedrive.

How do you do that with traditional on-site SMB shares? Sure you can do offline files but that introduces the same issues that we've been talking about here.

From a central shared drive - you're right, same problem.

@guyinpv - why the need for syncing? are the people really needing offline file access?

Because he has no idea what he is doing.

The answer to what he wants is to use WebDAV properly.

From NextCloud themselves:

The recommended way to synchronize a desktop PC with a Nextcloud server is by using Nextcloud/ownCloud sync clients.

Second, it's pretty stupid to say I don't know what I'm doing because the sync software doesn't do what it's suppose to. What does the software not working have to do with me? If the sync client worked right, there would be no problems at all!

I came in the office this morning immediately greeted with "you need to check the cloud..." because once again, somebody claims they moved files from one folder to another, and they DID move and sync, they saw it happen, but 3 days later all the files were magically moved back to their original location.
I don't even know under what conditions something like this could happen, it's like an "undo" event or something. My thoughts are that some other computer which was maybe turned off or hadn't synced in a while, uploaded its files back? Some kind of time stamp issue? I've checked all the computer's clocks but who knows.

@dashrender said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

i.e. 10 users 15 computers, 5 of them shared, 10 assigned, you'll need at least 11 accounts, or use one of the user's accounts on the 5 shared - but then you have no accountability for that one user - maybe that's not an issue.

It's really not. I'm trying to solve the most basic functionality at this point, which is to simply have a single shared folder that the whole office uses which is very robust.

And I would just get rid of the "cloud" and use a network share except that a few people want access from home and even a couple times from mobile/tablets/laptops, etc. There are ways to do that I know, but I thought cloud sync could easily do this.

@dashrender said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

How do these system deal with file locks?

There are no file locks without special activities. For example on OneDrive, if you open files directly via inside Word/Excel, you can have the system apply a lock (could be wrong).
I know that when we used Box, you could right-click a file and use a submenu to manually apply a lock, and then open the file, then manually remove the lock. But users simply wouldn't use it. Too many steps.

The only two ways I know to get out of this is either go back to LAN share and then sync that to a cloud service which can then be attached to offsite/mobiles.
Or secondly, completely change to Google Docs or MS online and tell people to edit docs in the browser, because they support multiple users editing at once. That's never going to happen though.

@irj said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

Why won't office 365 work? You can sync the user's files locally. I'm not understanding why that won't work for your situation. What am I missing?

1. We don't really have "user's files" per se. This is a general share for business docs, invoices, inventory stuff, documentation, etc. And not every document is a MS Office doc.
2. I'm ok with offline sync since it's only 11 gigs or so. I'll probably change that strategy once we start climbing to more significant sizes. But my experience with "virtual" file drives has not been great, I like an actual file to be on my actual computer.

@coliver

@coliver said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

@guyinpv said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

WebDAV is not the answer to my questions. Nobody here is going to work all day out of Cyberduck.

What... what are you talking about here? WebDAV connects identically to how a SMB share connects on a Windows machine. You simply mount it as a shared drive or add the WebDAV URL as a quick access point.

https://www.webdavsystem.com/server/access/windows/

You are correct. I conflated earlier comments regarding using SCP and Cyberduck, etc.

Interestingly, I force turned off the Synology, pulled the drives and did a quick canned air cleanup.

Turned back on and it came to life. Looking at the drive screen, the count of bad sectors is now at 38.
This makes no sense, jumping from 0 bad to 38 out of the blue.

I know enough about drives to know they can recover from bad sectors and avoid those areas of the disk. It's weird to me that it would bring down the entire volume and crash the whole thing over a bad sector.

Was reading this thread and seems some people thing it could be a DSM bug: https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=93339&start=30

I did happen to do a DSM upgrade this morning but all was well until I ran that full backup onto the USB drive. It crashed somewhere in the the middle of that backup.