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| Porn Users Forum » From backing up porn to redoing home electrical wiring |
| 1-11 of 11 Posts | Page 1 |
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| 10-01-16 05:53pm - 2910 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User  Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
From backing up porn to redoing home electrical wiring I love porn as much as ever, but without a doubt, I have hit the point of diminishing marginal return. Or, more to the point, increasing marginal expense. Let me bring you up to speed on recent developments with my collection. I had a chain of problems, one leading up to the next, that led to extensive down time and thousands of dollars of expenses. Mistake number one was almost a year ago when I used my triplicate backup hard drives to expand my collection in duplicate while I waited for the price on 6Tb drives to come down. Then, a couple of months ago, disaster struck. There was apparently an error in my eight bay enclosure, and all seven drives in the enclosure were simultaneously corrupted. These drives included the most up to date copy of my entire collection, and my duplicate backup was lagging behind by several months. Not willing to give up, resort to the backup, and lose my last several month's worth of downloads, I kept working on recovering the files on those drives. Long story short, after weeks of work, I was finally able to repair the file system on all of the drives except one, and recover all of those files. For the one drive that I could not repair, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to just resort to my backup and call it a day. So I started copying files from my backup, and believe it or not, while all my other backups worked fine, this one backup drive started showing signs of impending hardware failure, and the copy operation was extremely difficulty and nerve wracking. Long story short, it took me several more weeks to get all the files off of that drive, but I finally succeeded. I remade a triplicate copy of everything, this time on 6Tb drives. My office was a mess, due to the tangle of cords from both the backup drives and the new 6Tb drives, none of which I had broken out of their original cases. Now I was faced with a new and expensive dilemma. Do I trust my old enclosure again, even after a firmware update, or do I upgrade? I decided to upgrade. Things just get worse from here. I posted in February about building a cheap home file server using a Dell 3050 Mini PC and my 8 bay enclosure. Since then, I had upgraded the PC to the HP 251-a123w, an economical but bare bones desktop, since the 20 Gb SSD on the 3050 was too small to run 64-bit Windows 10. Now, I was looking at upgrading the PC again, since the slow 40 Mb/sec transfer rate from the one USB 3.0 port to any of the other three USB 2.0 ports was the main reason that I was lagging behind on my backups. They were annoyingly slow. So I was looking at high end desktops, shopping for a system that I could use to connect multiple enclosures directly via SATA or SAS, and I struck gold. I found a brand new Lenovo TS440 server, a model which Lenovo had just discontinued selling, on sale for $499!  It came with 4 hot swap HDD bays with the capacity for 4 more HDD bays plus a ninth HDD in one of the optical drive bays. I bought the expansion kit to add the additional 4 hot swap HDD bays. After reading the entire manual for the system, it was interesting that while they recommended standard precautions for electrostatic discharge for all maintenance including wearing a grounded wrist band, they gave extra recommendations for extreme caution with ESD when working with the backplanes for the HDD bays. Taking those precautions seriously, I broke out my grounded wrist band and workbench mat from my engineering school days. Before strapping my wrist to the ground connector of an outlet, I always test the outlet. In this case, I was surprised to learn that the ground pin of the outlet was not in fact grounded. I went around my house, testing other three pronged outlets which all should have been grounded, and none of them were. I checked and none of them were even wired to the ground. Argh!!! I had hired a very good inspector when I bought this house, and he was otherwise thorough and saved me thousands of dollars on other issues, but I cannot believe he never tested the outlets! Or maybe he did, but glossed over it because ungrounded outlets are sometimes allowed depending on the year in which a house is built. I could have done the testing myself... Now I need to read up on local electrical code and decide how to deal with this situation, because my house is now apparently a fire and shock prone deathtrap. There seem to be multiple ways to address this issue, but I expect it will cost thousands of dollars in any case. There goes the porn budget for now. Anyway, wish me luck. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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| 10-01-16 06:13pm - 2910 days | #2 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
^Good Luck because it's not just your porn collection that is at stake but maybe your health as well. My little porn collection issue doesn't even come close to yours because all I did was break the USB connector attached to the drive. Of course now I have a useless 2TB HD that I have no clue how to access. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 10-01-16 06:24pm - 2910 days | #3 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
Thanks. I highly recommend the Sabrent USB to SATA/2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE adapter. Model USB-DSC5.  Just break your drive out of it's case, there are plenty of YouTube videos for each model, then hook it up. Although the Sabrent webpage says it is compatible with up to 2Tb drives, I have found that it works great with even 5Tb drives. The added bonus is that it works with ancient IDE drives too. Haven't tested it with my new 6TB drives yet. In contrast, the popular Diablotek EN3525D HDD docking station is unpredictable when used with drives over 2Tb. For example, when I connect a 5Tb drive, it displays as two 2048 Gb drives. For what it is worth, Diablotek also says not to use with drives over 2Tb. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. Edited on Oct 01, 2016, 06:54pm | |
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| 10-02-16 08:54pm - 2909 days | #4 | |
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Toadsith (0)
Active User  Posts: 936 Registered: Dec 07, '07 Location: USA |
Yikes! That sounds like it was a horror show of a computer problem. Good luck with all that and the house wiring! "I'm not a number, I'm a free man!" Second Grand Order Poobah in the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo | |
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| 10-03-16 07:12am - 2909 days | #5 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
Thanks. At least it feels good to have my files back, and exciting to get the TS440 up and running soon. I did figure out that ungrounded outlets got grandfathered in by the electrical code based on the year in which my house was built. The cheapest way to get my house back in line with code would be to just swap the 3 prong outlets back out for 2 prong ones. That will at least prevent the dangerous situation of a fault in an ungrounded appliance which is designed to be grounded. For example, you might have an appliance with a grounded metal chassis. If the hot wire shorts to the chassis, the ground will divert the current away from you. But, if it is not in fact grounded, that shiny metal hairdryer or toaster will shock you as soon as you touch it. I was able to discretely snake up a grounded extension cord from one of four grounded outlets that I did find in the house. I think I'll go with this for now, and ground the outlet for my system as a DIY project. The cost of hiring an electrician to do this work would be near $10,000 plus drywall repair and repainting and I would rather spend that money on other things. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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| 10-03-16 01:39pm - 2908 days | #6 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
Jesus! And I thought I was a bit obsessive about my collection! All of my stuff is backed up (and stored in a different location) but a small part of it is triple backed up just because replacing it would be almost impossible. Most of that is stuff from the 1990s that wouldn't be available any longer. Yes, it looks terrible, but it is still some of my favorite stuff. I don't want to drag this thread too far away from your original premise, but how does one check the ground in an outlet? I do know I need to replace the ground clamp on my main water supply line, but assuming that's okay how can I ensure proper ground. (And in my years posting here I'd have never expected to ask this question on this forum!) | |
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| 10-03-16 02:26pm - 2908 days | #7 | |
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Wittyguy (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,138 Registered: Feb 04, '08 Location: Left Coast, USA |
x Edited on Apr 19, 2023, 01:23pm | |
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| 10-03-16 02:29pm - 2908 days | #8 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
You can use an inexpensive outlet tester that you can get for around $5. This site describes how to do it: http://www.acmehowto.com/electrical/grounding.php Be sure to read the safety section on that site and wear rubber soled shoes. It is a good basic test and will pick up the vast majority of ungrounded outlets. The only way it might mislead you is if someone wired the ground to neutral, which does unfortunately happen sometimes. In that case, you would not see ground wire going back to your panel though. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. Edited on Oct 03, 2016, 02:51pm (LPee23: Tried to remove hotlink and leave URL) | |
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| 10-03-16 02:43pm - 2908 days | #9 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
I think I got it worked out when I finally found a few outlets in the renovated kitchen that were actually grounded and I ran an extension cord over. I did also just set up a UPS today that corrects for voltage fluctuations. Interestingly, it gives a continuous readout of input voltage, and I learned that my microwave oven draws enough power to lower voltage in that entire circuit by 10 V. Anyway, DIY projects and electrical have been hobbies of mine for a long time, so this stuff is kind of enjoyable for me. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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| 10-03-16 03:09pm - 2908 days | #10 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
Thank You Lpee. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 11-05-16 01:47am - 2876 days | #11 | |
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CharlieSkyward (0)
Suspended Posts: 16 Registered: Oct 25, '16 Location: UK |
On Ebay I was able to get hold of an HP microserver G7 for £100 and a couple of HP ML110 G5's for £50 each. I generally use 2TB hard drives, though have a couple of 4TB usb drives. I generally use identical pairs, and every few months have a machine in the corner (a laptop is fine for this), run sha256sum over each file and compare to already computed hashes. If an error occurs, I get two more identical drives, and copy to them, and mark both older drives as unreliable (that is, use, but do not trust). While there are things like RAID and ZFS around, for me manually computing hashes, and syncing with rsync is sufficient: rsync -haux --progress /d/a/PornFiles /d/b is sufficient, and then you just leave the machine to get on with it. The trouble with RAID mirroring is that if your software screws up, you simultaneously screw up all parallel copies (RAID protects form hardware failure, but not software failure or user error). Offline and offsite backups are important for this reason: what you are aiming to do is to arrange things so that multiple unlikely mishaps are required to happen simultaneously for you to lose your data. Personally I found porn a wonderful motivation to learn all about 'enterprise data management' and similar, even though I have no actual intention of a having a porn collection larger enough to require a data centre. (Only large enough that I won't run out of good porn to watch, and with enough storage that I don't have to worry about deleting old porn to make way for new.) | |
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