Synchronization

This article shows how to synchronize your Frigate NVR recordings to offsite cloud storage for backup and safekeeping in case your onsite NVR is stolen by a burglar. Toolkit: Backblaze + rclone + Systemd Service Script I’m using Backblaze as cloud storage because it’s fast and inexpensive. It also offers temporary immutability, preventing burglars who gained access to the source machine from deleting uploaded recordings for a configurable length of time. The backup job is left to rclone, a modern file copy and sync tool for a multitude a cloud storage providers. A custom systemd service controls the backup process via a little script. To ensure low upload latency, it monitors Frigate’s recordings directory for changes and invokes rclone immediately when a new file has been created.

This article explains how to set up Syncthing in a Docker container and configure synchronization with peers on Windows PCs. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services.

There are a number of services for sending files to someone else that are both free and secure. This post provides an overview. What is End-to-End Encrypted File Sending? File sending services work similarly to file synchronization & sharing services, except there is no synchronization part. You navigate to the service’s website, select the files you want to send, and they’re encrypted on your machine while being uploaded. You get a link to be shared with the files’ recipient. The service stores the files for a certain time, typically seven days. That is how long the link remains valid. It is important to note that end-to-end encrypted sending services cannot decipher your data, for them it’s just meaningless bits.

After many years as a happy user, I switched from Chrome to Firefox. How did that go? Astonishingly well! Here are some notes I took in the process. My History of Changing Browsers Netscape to Internet Explorer I think I started out with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95. My first change of browsers happened with Windows NT 4 and Internet Explorer 4. That was a great browser! Everybody switched to IE in the following years. Microsoft’s domination of the browser market (yes, that was a reality for many years) started right there with IE4. Internet Explorer was successful not only because it was bundled with the operating system, but also because it was a good application.

Note-taking is one of those topics that appear to have been solved long ago, yet offer plenty of opportunity for new contestants. There are multiple reasons for that, but for me the number one is encryption. The major players, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, and Google Keep, store your thoughts and ideas in plain text on any synchronized device as well as their cloud servers. In the age of hacks, leaks, and exploits it does not take much to conjure up scenarios where those thoughts become public knowledge all of a sudden.

I have been watching streaming video for a very long time. It always worked beautifully, in high resolutions and from any site: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, you name it. Then suddenly I started to notice lip sync issues, probably around autumn/winter 2016. The longer a video played, the more the audio would get out of sync with the video, making watching and listening increasingly awkward. Recently I finally found the time to analyze these audio/video sync problems. Read on for a playback troubleshooting methodology followed by a workaround for the issue at hand.

As the Box IPO shows enterprise cloud file synchronization & sharing (EFSS) is a hot topic. Yet the hottest vendors do not “get” security. Kryha-Chiffriermaschine, Kryha-Encryption Device by Ryan Somma under CCWhat is Cloud EFSS? Everybody knows what a file server is. It stores any kind of document an organization needs to work with. As such its importance is similar to email. A file server’s main characteristics are:

Windows Offline Files have a bad reputation. Many an administrator can tell a story where Offline Files caused issues that sometimes even required a reinstallation of the affected PC. But Microsoft has gradually improved the functionality and ironed out many of the bugs. Today - in Windows 7 SP1 with all post-SP1 fixes - Offline Files is a technology that still has its problems, but can be used in production - if you are adventurous. This article lists the gotchas I am aware of.