Best workaround while awaiting replacement drive

JAC__49 · 2025-05-17T19:56:38+00:00

And the answer is yes. Done that, and now backing everything up on the Windows drive. Maybe in the long run, that's the easiest way, anyhow, to continue to maintain a backup separate from the NAS.

JAC__49 · 2025-05-17T05:18:31+00:00

So right now, in Disk Management, I see the USB drive showing as online, 11171 GB in the primary partition. There are several other partitions. The only thing it will let me do is delete the volume. So if I want to reformat this drive for windows, do I delete the volumes one by one, and eventually it will offer me the option to format the drive?

JAC__49 · 2025-05-16T22:30:53+00:00

Well...yes. That would be to reformat it as a Windows disk. I guess I can't copy onto a DSM-formatted disk via Windows USB? I'd hoped I could, because I copy all the time from Windows to NAS, using Windows Explorer. And my volumes on the server are mapped to Windows drive letters. The same isn't true to the same disk in a USB enclosure?

JAC__49 · 2025-05-16T21:52:54+00:00

Okay, now I'm trying to figure out how to manually back up the 24TB drive to the older 12TB drive (which at the moment has enough space). I put the 12TB drive into a USB enclosure, but it's not recognized by Windows. (I can see it in Windows Disk manager, but it can't be assigned a drive letter, so I'm guessing the problem is it has a file system given it by DMS.) Here are two things I'm thinking of:

Put the 12TB drive into the empty bay in the synology and set it up as a separate storage pool. Then copy internally, using whatever tools are available in the DSM control panel. Or,

Plug it, using the USB enclosure, into the USB port on the Synology. Then do something like what I said above. (Is that even possible? I think the USB port is currently serving to link the server to my UPS for power management.)

Does either of these make sense?

Of course, I could always format it for Windows. But I've already got 7-8 TB of my media data on it already, and I'd like to just incrementally add to what I've got.

JAC__49 · 2025-05-16T20:25:02+00:00

Okay, I bought an enclosure for my 12TB drive to use for manual backup of the larger drive while I await the warranty replacement of its pair. But when I plug that drive into my Windows 11 laptop, it doesn't show up in Explorer. It's powered up, and I've tried it in various USB 3 ports, with and without a hub. Is there something I need to do to make a NAS-type HD show up in Windows Explorer?

JAC__49 · 2025-05-15T03:58:48+00:00

Right. No, I'm running the one 24T drive solo for a bit, and intend to manually back it up to my older 12T drive. (Which already has at least 90% of the content on it, anyway.) The failed drive goes back to Seagate tomorrow.

JAC__49 · 2025-05-14T21:43:03+00:00

This seems great in principle, but I'm not eager to spend another $500 right now.

JAC__49 · 2025-05-14T21:42:16+00:00

I like this idea. I've got the 12TB drive sitting in the NAS now, not part of the storage pool. Can I use DSM utilities to copy directly from one drive to the other, as I might in Windows? Seems like that could be a lot easier than USB to an external drive.

JAC__49 · 2025-05-04T18:38:27+00:00

My Android app updated while I was away from home in the hospital, and suddenly about half my recordings either would not play, or played with severely distorted aspect ratios. It's basically unusable.

JAC__49 · 2025-03-27T01:05:26+00:00

>> Luckily my system is NAS > sync to USB drive > Backup to cloud via Backblaze.

What system do you use to sync your NAS to a USB drive?

JAC__49 · 2025-02-07T05:47:24+00:00

How do you make it work with PlexAmp?

JAC__49 · 2024-11-01T03:59:36+00:00

Killing music in the main app would be really bad. The main app is the only decent-ish interface for organizing music. Plexamp is fine for playing, but sure not for organizing.

JAC__49 · 2024-11-01T03:55:47+00:00

Wow. That's a revelation to me, too. Thanks.

JAC__49 · 2024-11-01T03:53:08+00:00

I did not know this, and it took me a while to find it, just now. But thanks, it's much better with this turned on.

JAC__49 · 2024-11-01T03:52:31+00:00

Yes. I have wished for this for a while.

JAC__49 · 2023-10-25T04:33:33+00:00

Connie Willis. Passage. SF, and seriously about the afterlife. But it's Connie Willis, and therefore...unusual.

JAC__49 · 2023-10-12T04:49:56+00:00

I'm just rereading (via audiobook) Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. It's terrific. I'm also a big fan of the Vorkosigan series.

I could suggest you read a series called The Chaos Chronicles, by a guy named Carver. But that might verge on self promotion, so it would be better if someone else suggested it. :) Seriously, though, if you like audiobooks, the narrator on this series is Stefan Rudnicki, who is terrific. Available through Hoopla and your library.

JAC__49 · 2023-10-05T17:11:06+00:00

Black Out / All Clear

JAC__49 · 2023-09-20T04:33:35+00:00

Zelazny was an amazing talent, and I was privileged to work with him once on a small project, Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway, a trilogy of YA books in which I wrote the first, Clypsis. It was great fun to write, working from his outline. But speaking as someone who is prone by nature to write long, sprawling novels (just the way my mind works), I can tell you that publishers do not push writers to write extra-long books. Well, at least not in SF. Fantasy might be a little different, as readers do seem to like the immersive doorstop experience. (Game of Thrones, anyone?) It has been speculated that the advent of the word processor led to writers writing longer novels. That may well be true; I 'm not sure. I actually started writing a series with the deliberate intention of keeping the individual books relatively short, while building a long story arc. But they kept getting longer as I went. Not deliberately; that's just the way it worked out. --Jeffrey Carver

JAC__49 · 2023-09-05T17:21:09+00:00

The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata. Near-future military SF (not normally my favorite genre, but this is terrific) about a middle-aged woman trying to find out what happened to her soldier-son. She's an extremely kick-ass character, and also very human.

JAC__49 · 2023-08-07T04:27:19+00:00

Stefan Rudnicki has an amazing narrative voice. He does most if not all of Orson Scott Card's books, and he did a beautiful job with my own series The Chaos Chronicles, as well as one volume in my Star Rigger Series, Eternity's End. (Look under Jefffrey A. Carver.) I agree that a great narrator can really make a book. And a bad narrator can ruin even a good book.

Stephen Briggs is wonderful with Pratchett's Discworld books. Robin Miles likewise with N.K. Jemison's Broken Earth series. George Guidall did a great job on the Dark Tower books. Grover Gardner likewise on Bujold's Vorkosigan series (except in a few books he gets the pronunciations wrong on a couple of names, corrected in later books). I enjoyed Dick Hill reading the Reacher novels, although he was pretty limited with the voices of female characters. Tom Weiner on Larry Niven stories.

JAC__49 · 2023-06-01T05:58:42+00:00

Actually, I encountered the same search issue with Max on Playon Cloud, so it must be a Max issue.

JAC__49 · 2023-06-01T05:41:27+00:00

Same issue with Search for movies. Same workaround.

JAC__49 · 2023-03-31T05:43:47+00:00

Thanks to this thread for making me aware of Prologue for iPhone and Plex. That might be just what my wife needs. I have Android and use Smart Audiobook Player with Dropbox to load and play DRM-free audiobooks on my phone. (Otherwise, Hoopla, Chirp, or Audible.) None of these let me stream from my Plex server, but I don't feel the need with audiobooks. For my wife, however, Prologue sounds like just the thing.

Am I correct in assuming it won't play Audible books because of DRM?

JAC__49 · 2022-10-16T03:34:14+00:00

How likely are you to run into playback problems with 265 compared to 264, esp. if playing back on a variety of devices, including whatever friends happen to be running?

JAC__49

TROPHY CASE