Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

From the article: "In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued.

Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years. As the company put it bluntly, "We need to review our business structure in order to improve profitability.""

This will not affect production of discs for things like home video and computer games, just consumer recordable discs.

No doubt a lot of people are going to get stung by this. And I'm sure they're useful. But let's look at the computer that I'm on right now. It has 550 gig in use on the main drive. That's five discs to archive it. Five discs that have to be swapped out. OR one 4 terabyte external hard drive that I can do multiple generations of backups to and I don't have to swap discs out during the backup process: plug in the drive, start the backup, walk away.

Now, an external HD is not an archival backup, that hard drive will not last decades, which presumably the writeable discs will - if you keep track of them, AND they remain undamaged, AND your external drive keeps working or you can get another. Those are a lot of ifs and ands.

Backups have always sucked. And archiving materials suck even worse, speaking as a computer guy of several decades and a librarian.

https://www.techspot.com/news/103709-sony-killing-off-recordable-blu-ray-bidding-farewell.html

I'm having the weirdest thing happen with a particular backup device for my Mac, and I don't think it's Mac specific, so bear with me if you're a PC or *nix person.

I'm backing up four Macs, an iMac and three laptops. I have two backup drives, an 8 TB and a USB hard drive dock that I plug a 5 TB bare drive in to. And that dock has been absolutely fine since I got it.

So far, so good.

The issue started in January. For reasons that are too tedious to go in to, I had to upgrade my iMac from an old Mac OS to the latest, Monterrey. At that point something happened and every time I plug in the dock, the computer freaks out and loses Bluetooth connectivity with the keyboard and trackpad!

Weird, eh?!

That same dock works fine with the other three laptops. And the 8 TB works fine with all four computers.

Now, a friend of mine, when he does OS upgrades - not updates - always disconnects his Time Machine backup drives as he's had some terrible problems in the past. And that's what I did when I did my Monterrey install. He's had the backup drive corrupt on him, and I wanted to make sure I had a solid fallback point. And now that drive is inaccessible.

The iMac itself is a 2015 27" 5K iMac, and is exhibiting display problems. Very rarely, but on at least two occasions in the last year or so. And it's clearly out of warranty. It behaves if I plug in an external monitor, so it should have some life left in it yet. Still, that does demonstrate that there is something slightly wrong inside, and if one thing is wrong, there could be more than one thing wrong.

I'm not too worried about the contents of the 5 TB bare drive as the backup is now refreshed on the 8 TB drive. I'm just curious what people's thoughts might be. But basically, if I plug in the 5 TB drive and dock, I'm looking at a power switch power-off situation. Which really sucks.

Thoughts?

My wife brought home my other backup drive. I plugged it in last night, reconfigured my Time Machine backup, and left it to do its thing. The power supply and USB cable were the same as the drive that gave me problems.

Get home tonight and there's the same error message, Disk Not Ejected Properly.

I don't have time to spend on it tonight, probably won't until the weekend. So it's either power supply, cable, or something odd in my computer. None of them are likely, but two bad drives are even less likely. The interesting thing is that it's intermittent: the drive always reconnects and apparently completes backups.

Wednesday night I got an email from a friend whom I used to work with. She'd gone to a doctor that afternoon and their office was in a kind of chaos: the office had been hit by at least two different kinds of ransomware attacks. She wanted to know if I could help.

That night I did some research on the particular attacks, found out they were variants of the same core and both were based on exploiting weak Windows RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) passwords. RDP is a back door to a server that techs use for management. It should NEVER be left open! There are other, more secure, ways to manage servers. If it must be left open, then it should have a VERY secure, i.e. LONG and complicated, password on it.

Obviously it did not.

A friend of the doctor's is their main IT guy, but he's not local, and he's decent but not top drawer. This problem apparently was discovered before Wednesday, and their guy (let's call him Bob) was making a new server for them with the latest version of Windows Server and SQL Server. The software that their clinic uses is mainly based in SQL Server, and here's the really suckie part: it was running Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008. And plugged straight in to a router to the internet. No hardware firewall, vendor-provided router.

*facepalm*

I didn't bother checking to see the patch level on their Windows Server 2008, it was kind of pointless. I did note that their SQL Server 2008 was well below the final patches that were released for it, not that it mattered as all of its databases had been encrypted.

The new router, though consumer grade, is fully patched. The new server is fully patched. A new Cisco firewall is on order. That's the best that we can do right now.

I was there Thursday from 11am to 8pm, then worked at home from 10pm to midnight copying, compressing (7zip), and uploading a big analytics file to a forensics company who sent us a utility to try and figure out what happened. Friday I only put in five hours, finishing up an inventory of all of the computers (which they didn't have) to figure out what should be tossed and what could be upgraded to get them all up to Windows 10 Pro and writing up some reports.

One woman complained to us that her computer was really slow. And it was. It was absolutely horribly slow! I was afraid that it had something nasty running under the covers, then I opened up Control Panel and did some poking around and found that it was a Pentium 4 with 2 gig of memory running Windows 10. The Performance Index, Satisfaction Index, whatever index, was 1.0. So we ordered her a new computer.

I always had a three-step plan when it came to buying computers to make them last longer and save money. When a new OS came out and the original started slowing down: add memory. That usually sped things up. Next OS comes out: install a better video card. Next OS comes out: buy a new computer. All of their computers are running at least 4 gig of memory, odds are they're all running a motherboard-based video card. I'm hoping we might be able to do memory upgrades and install some video cards and upgrade some of these for about $100-150 instead of tossing them. We shall see. I'll do some more inventory work next week now that we have a better idea as to what's out there.

This weekend I'm writing up a report more detailed than the single page invoice that just had bullet points as to what I did, I'm also burning a DVD with bootable malware/virus inspection software that'll look deeper in to the OS than something like Symantec can do, and since you're booting from read-only media, it'll look for boot kits that are otherwise invisible. I'll get to inspect all of the workstations! That'll make everyone oh so very happy to have their computer denied to them for however long it takes.

The tragic thing is that their backups weren't running properly because they had a terrible internet connection that couldn't handle the transfer. The software did a nightly backup to their vendor, but it had been failing. And they weren't doing anything locally, so they didn't really have a fall-back point to recover from. Their practice software vendor was able to restore from an earlier backup, but I don't know how successful that was in terms of how old and was there any corruption in it. I'll be finding that out Monday. This gets their patient information back, which is critical. And their insurance information is also processed online, so that should be safe. But anything stored locally may be lost.

And the horrible thing about that is the way the database is configured! I'm a database guy, I've been working with SQL Server for 25 years, since the first Microsoft version came out running on Lan Man/OS2. And the vendor has a VERY bad configuration. And I won't improve it unless they say it's OK. We're going to set up local backups, I've stressed upon the office manager the importance of rotating backup media and having a fire-proof safe in-house for storing said media. So eventually they'll be in a much better place.

The big question is whether or not they have to notify all their patients. I don't think this represents a HIPAA information spill. These ransomware encryptions are fully automated attacks by bots, I've never heard of data being exfiltrated and used for further extortion, that's a much more targeted attack. I'm going to have to tell the doctor who owns the practice to talk to his attorney and discuss this point because that's far outside of my ability to give him a recommendation.

Bruce Schneier shares two stories, one of a U.S. man whose murder conviction was thrown out and he will be re-tried because a virus ate the stenographer's homeworkaudio transcript. The stenographer didn't bring enough paper, relied on audio recordings, copied the audio recordings to her computer, and a virus destroyed them before they were transcribed.

She is now an unemployed stenographer.

Bruce also mentions PhD students losing their thesis documentation due to lack of backups. I'm sure this is really common this time of year/semester.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/the_importance_2.html


The Tao of Backups site is a site selling a commercial product, but the lessons that it teaches are quite applicable even to home users.

I've always maintained a paranoid approach to backups.

1. First, back up regularly. This is easy with a Mac: leave an external drive plugged in and let Time Machine back up the machine hourly. I can't speak to other platforms, but there's lots of backup software out there and you can at least back up your changing documents. Documents that don't change as often, such as music or photo libraries, don't need to be backed up as often, but still need to be backed up.


2. Second, TEST BACKUPS. Backups are worth nothing if you don't test them to make sure data is not only being written elsewhere, but can be read. There are all too many stories of people who've done backups faithfully, but never tested them, only to find out that the backup had a problem and could not be recovered. I admit that I'm a little lax on this one.


3. Third, distribute backups. If your backup is in your house and your house is burgled or lost to a disaster, you don't have a backup. And you might have lost your computer at the same time, so you're doubly-screwed. Backups need to be separated geographically, so that a disaster that strikes one place may not affect another. My off-site backups are stored at the observatory, which is safer from fire than our house, and is 20 miles away.


4. Fourth, if you can, maintain multiple generations of backups. In my first job as a network administrator in the late 80's, we had five boxes of backup tapes. Each box was labeled Week 1 through 5 as there are no more than five weeks in a month. Each tape was labeled with the week number and started with Tuesday to make accommodating Monday holidays more easy, that was the day that the tape was inserted. On the first work day of the month, the tape from the previous night was removed, relabeled, and taken to an off-site warehouse and stored in a fire-proof cabinet. It wasn't a bad methodology, but it could have been better. Myself, in previous generations when tape drives were viable for personal backups, I maintained three copies. I would back up my system and take that tape to work, where there were two tapes that were dated. The oldest tape would be taken home that night and my computer backed up again. So I had pretty much two copies available and one older generation. But now with the way that disk storage has expanded, the only way you can effectively back up is to another hard drive. Currently I maintain two sets of backup drives, a pair of 3 terabyte and a pair of 1 terabyte drives. The 1 TBs are for backing up our laptops, the 3 TBs back up my 27" iMac which has a 2 gig drive which is 3/4ths full. I encrypt my backups (easily done with Mac's Time Machine) and swap the drives every month or so and before we go on a road trip.

External hard drives are not expensive, buy one that is 2-3 times the capacity of the systems that you're backing up if you can. I don't follow this rule with my iMac because I already had the 3 TB drives before the iMac came along, and that drive was big enough to back up all of my computers, but adding the iMac changed that mix. If you're buying multiple drives, try to stick with the same manufacturer and series so that your power supplies and cables are the same. This way you just take the drive back and forth to your offsite location and not the power supply and USB cable. And by encrypting your backups you're guaranteed that whoever you work with can't be nosy and look in to your data. But you need to make sure your encryption password schemes are known to your spouses or whoever will take over your information if something happens to you.

http://taobackup.com

(And I can't believe that I remembered the syntax for doing an HTML ordered list and got it right the first time!)

Pick up some CD/DVD sleeves, they might be in the same aisle as the DVDs. You can get a box of 50 of them for pretty cheap. Also get a medium-point Sharpie marker to write date and basic content info onto the DVDs. Don't bother with printing labels and sticking them on, theoretically you won't be pulling these out on a regular basis to load things from them and the additional cost and labor just isn't worth it.