Using MediaMonkey with a shared music folder hosted on one machine...

I was all set to explain how I use MediaMonkey on a variety of different machines on a LogMeIn Hamachi VPN to access a common shared music folder on my home machine, and then I thought I should check first to see if anyone has already posted something to explain it, and sure enough, someone had...

http://tipsfor.us/2009/03/20/share-and-sync-your-music-library-with-mediamonkey/

That post does a nice job of walking through all the steps needed to configure MediaMonkey on a variety of machines that are all on the same network.

Poor man's remote backup via LogMein Hamachi, Robocopy, and Task Scheduler

Mainly so I can remember what I am doing for remote backup, I wanted to share what I have lashed together from a wonderful free private VPN service, LogMeIn Hamachi, and the Windows Robocopy and Task Scheduler.  I guess for what I specify below to work, you don't really need to use LogMeIn Hamachi, you could use over a secure  home network or VPN, as long as the two computers are accessible to each other via specification of a UNC.

Don't proceed unless you already know something about accessing resources over a network (i.e. you know what a UNC address looks like), you are familiar with Task Scheduler, and more generally, you know what you are doing.  And unless you know something about sharing folders in Windows and setting permissions, don't go any further, you're really endangering yourself.  This guide is intended with someone already familiar with the elements I refer to, and is intended more than anything else as a hint about to put them together for a poor man's remote backup.  I absolutely can't provide any help to anyone, and you really shouldn't try any of this unless you have a pretty good idea of what the elements are.

Basically I wanted to automatically backup the contents of my Users folder on home machine to an external drive on my office machine, and the contents of my Users folder on my office machine to my home machine.  I am not too worried about backing up a drive image because I use only a limited number of apps, and anyway, if something happens to my machine that requires a restoration, I would rather just reinstall the operating system and the apps rather than restore from an image.  So all I care about is backing up content.

The solution that I finally settled on was to take advantage of the existing VPN I had created with Hamachi LogMeIn that connected my home and office computers and my laptops, and then set up a Robocopy task to run regularly with Windows Task Scheduler.

What is Robocopy?  It is a Windows utility that is like the old XCopy on steroids.  It has a rich, maybe overwhelming array of options for mass copying of files, including lots of flags that allow restricting copying to files that are newer on the source than on the destination, and so forth.  I had experimented with a bunch of different approaches to automated copying, most notably SyncToy, but in my experience they didn't work.  SyncToy is very nice but it seemed to choke on large folders with lots of subdirectories and small files, for example, music collection, and photo collection.  Other tools I experimented with always seemed to have some problem, for example, they didn't play well with network locations, and so forth.  Robocopy, however, seems to be really robust, and I haven't had any trouble whatsoever with it.

I shared the user directories on my home and office machines with appropriate permissions so the folders would be accessible only to my own password protected user accounts on other machines on the network.  If you don't know or understand what permissions are for shared folders, don't read any further, this is not for you and trying this could be really dangerous.

Say that the Hamachi-assigned IP address of my home machine was 5.1.1.1 and the IP address of my office machine was 5.1.1.2..., and I had shared C:\Users\John Smith on my home machine as "John Smith Home"

And on my office machine I had an external HD (F:) with a folder to be used for home backup called "Home Backup"

I specified a task on my office machine to run every day that looked like the following...

Robocopy "\\5.1.1.1\John Smith Home" "F:\Home Backup" /XA:HS /S /XO /XD AppData Searches Desktop Downloads Favorites Links /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /LOG:"C:\Users\John Smith\Documents\Home Backup .log"

All those flags are basically there to the specify the files that are being copied.  Key ones are /S, for copying subdirectories, /XD for excluding directories, in this case AppData Searches and so forth, all stuff I didn't want backed up, /XA for excluding files with particular attributes set, in this case /XA:HD excludes hidden files,  /MIR specifies mirror so that files that are no longer on the source are deleted from the destination, /XO excludes older files (i.e. only copy files that are newer on the source than on the destination), /R:0 soecifies number of retries on failed copies, in this case I set to zero so it would give up on a failure and move to the next file, /W:0 is wait time between retries, set to 0 here but meaningless since the /R:0 should prevent any retries, finally /LOG specifies a log file.

I set up additional tasks for my photo collection since it was too large to reside on my C: drive, and is on an  external drive.

I did the same on my home machine to backup my office.

This has been running smoothly now for several years, and works for me.  It seems to work a lot better for backing up really large folder trees with thousands and thousands of files like my music and photo collections than SyncToy and some of the other applications I experimented with.  As I mentioned, SyncToy seemed to choke when thousands of files were involved.

One problem I did encounter: using Robocopy to back up directory trees associated with the latest versions of Thunderbird seemed to be impossible.  At least the most recent version of Thunderbird I had seemed to create thousands and thousands of folders with strange names and backup always seemed to blow up.  Since I had given up on Thunderbird anyway, and only wanted my old email for archival purposes, I just zipped the whole directory so it would copy as one big file.

Windows Live Sync and Dropbox, thoughts and comments after several months of use...

I've been running both Windows Live Sync and Dropbox now for several months.  My Dropbox account is a 50Gb paid account.  I find myself using both of them, for related but slightly different purposes.

The main difference between Live Sync and Dropbox is that with Dropbox, files are also 'in the cloud' so they can be accessed via the web, and if you add a new computer, the files sync from the 'the cloud' rather than other computers.  If you add a new machine to your Dropbox account, therefore, it will begin syncing immediately, even if none of the other machines it is linked to are online.  With Windows Live Sync, files exist only on the computers that have been paired.  If you add a new computer but none of the machines that you want to pair to are online, the files on those machines won't sync over until one of them is online.

Another big difference, of course, is that Dropbox is a paid service if you want to use more than a few Gb, and it isn't cheap.  I don't mind paying, however, since it is so convenient and useful.  One feature that I fortunately have not had to use, but gives me peace of mind, is Undo, which allows retrieval of older versions of files, up to 30 days.  For extra money, there is another feature that removes the 30 day limit for Undo.

Basically, I use Dropbox to Sync the entire contents of My Documents across my office desktop and two laptops.  It works seamlessly.  I work on a file in the evening at home, and next morning it is there in my office.  Because everything is up on the cloud, if I need a file and I'm not on one of my computers, I can just log in to the web page and retrieve the file.  I've used this a few times when giving presentations in venues that already had a machine.  I just logged in, retrieved my ppt, and did my presentation.  This has also been very handy a few times when I needed to print something at the business center of a hotel.  For various reasons, I don't like flash drives.

I also make heavy use of shared folders in Dropbox for collaboration, but at present there is one frustrating limitation.  I work with people in Asia and the East Coast, and as long as they're not in China (more about that later) we can collaborate fairly seamlessly on documents in shared folders.  One limitation that is somewhat frustrating is that folders on a paid account that are shared with people with a free account also count toward their 2gb quota.  So basically sharing with people with free accounts works well only for documents and smaller files.  If you want to share large data files, or images, or anything that takes up a lot of shortage, you will blow through their free quota pretty quickly.  I do find this a bit frustrating, and I hope that Dropbox figures out a way of introducing some kind of functionality that would permit sharing of larger amounts of data paid accounts to free data.  I did correspond with Dropbox about this and they had a fairly reasonably explanation for why they are doing things this way, and apparently they are looking at creating some options that would facilitate the kind of sharing I have in mind, so maybe this will be resolved.

Another issue that has emerged with Dropbox is that since the beginning of May 2010, or perhaps late April, it has been blocked in China, for who knows what reason.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I understand but don't sympathize with China's decision to block Twitter and Facebook since the experience of Iran and other countries shows that they could be used to organize protests and so forth, but why Dropbox?  It is all a mystery.  So if you want to have remote access to your files in China, or share files with someone in China, for the time being Dropbox is not a viable option.

So if I like Dropbox so much, why am I also using Live Sync?  It is free, and since nothing is being hosted in the cloud, there isn't any space limitation.  I think there is some kind of limitation in terms of the total number of folders you can sync and how many computers you can sync across, and each synced folder can only have 20,000 files, but for me that is only an issue for syncing my picture collection.  Syncing my music collection was fine since I was able to break it into two folders of less than 20,000 files each, but reorganizing my much larger photo collection to make it compatible with Live Sync would be too cumbersome, so I use another approach for backing up my photos, which I will describe in another post.  I wish they would relax the 20,000 file limit so I could sync my photo folders.

Thus I use Live Sync to sync a work directories that contain a lot of data (> 100gb) and are accordingly too large for Dropbox.  These are data files that I can only work with on my desktop and laptops and don't need remote access to them, and I have daily off-site backups for them.

Live Sync also allows folder sharing with more options than Dropbox.  Like Dropbox, it allows folder sharing where both parties have full rights over all the contents of the shared folder.  Unlike Dropbox, it offers other choices, including making the contents of the folder read-only for the party it is being shared with.  We have been experimenting with using this to give access to my data directories to collaborators, so they can retrieve any file they need whenever they want, without risking my original files being corrupted.

And here's something else: at least at this moment, Live Sync still works in China.  So the people I was working with there have installed Live Sync and we're sharing folders with each other.  Who knows how long this will last, but it is OK for the time being.  Microsoft web services never seem to encounter trouble in China, and I certainly have some suspicions as to why, so I am hoping Live Sync will be a viable long-term option for collaboration with people in China.

One other limitation with Live Sync: it doesn't play well with external storage.  If you sync with a folder on an external hard drive, maybe because like me you want an external HD that is always ready to grab-and-go, it will work fine as long as the drive is attached, but if Live Sync ever runs while the HD is detached, it becomes upset, and forgets the pair, and you have to pair the folder again.  I wish it would remember the pair and then sync next time the HD was hooked up.

Both Dropbox and Live Sync both seem very robust and have nice user interfaces.

Dropbox blocked in... that big Asian country that keeps blocking stuff, you know which one

This evening I was in touch with some people I work with in the capital of that big Asian country where sites that people find useful are routinely blocked...  you know the country...  and now it turns out that Dropbox is blocked there too!  We needed to transfer some work-related files and lo and behold the client was no longer working there.  It couldn't connect to the Dropbox servers.  I checked in the Dropbox forums and on the web and it seems to be confirmed. 

We're looking into workarounds right now, but this is soooo stupid.

I can understand -- though I don't sympathize with or approve of -- why that unnamed government would block Twitter and Facebook and some social networking services.  That government knows very well that their system is a skyscraper built of cheap balsa, a house of cards.  Given the seething anger and resentment on the part of the population about widespread corruption and widening inequality, sooner or later some initially local incident could trigger an uprising and the whole thing could come apart.  Services like Twitter and Facebook could be the medium through which the equivalent of a 'color revolution' like the ones in Eastern Europe and some other former Soviet Republics would most likely be coordinated.  So I get why they block Twitter and Facebook.  The government is afraid that they could be used to organize an uprising, or a 'color revolution.'  I don't like it, in fact I detest it, but at least I see the logic.

The question is, therefore, what in God's name does any of this have to do with a service like Dropbox.  I'm a pretty creative and imaginative guy, but I have a hard time figuring out how anyone could use Dropbox to organize a revolution.  Gee, I'll put the .pptx file with all the secret plans for the revolution into the folder I have shared with my 10 friends and wait for to sync with them, and then they can copy it over to the folders they have shared with their friends?  I just don't get it.  The whole point of Twitter and Facebook is that you could spread the news about a plan for a protest march to hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes and thereby coordinate mass action. 

In other words, how do you organize a revolution using Dropbox?  Why would anyone be afraid of Dropbox?  I guess I'm missing something here, folks.  Somebody help me out here.  I just don't get how Dropbox is a threat to anyone.  Oh well.

Why I deleted my Facebook account

I finally deleted my Facebook account. 

I did so with some regret because Facebook had allowed me to reestablish contact with many high school and college classmates, distant relatives, and old friends I hadn't heard from in years.  But recently I came to the conclusion that the risks associated with Facebook outweighed the benefits.  While I accept that being on the internet inevitably involves some loss of privacy, what concerned me with Facebook was that I no longer could figure out what was private and what wasn't, and how to control it. 

Especially with the recent introduction of Facebook Connect, the imminent expansion of the Open Graph, and some changes like the way that schools, workplaces and so forth were handled, the privacy controls had become so opaque or convoluted that I no longer had any confidence that I had control over anything.  The privacy controls, which were already a mess, were now spread across even more pages, with descriptions that were opaque, and seemed to require lots more clicking and reading of additional web pages to understand what was going on.  This NY Times article pretty much sums up how much of a cesspool the privacy options on Facebook have become.

What especially concerned me was that whatever I did in terms of setting privacy controls on Facebook didn't seem to propagate to its partners.  I went to some lengths to prevent my list of friends from being displayed on my Facebook profile.  I had it set so that it was not only concealed from public view, but also from my friends.  But I noticed when I went to Pandora and Yelp, my public profiles there had a list of my Facebook friends who were using those services.  With Facebook rolling out Facebook Connect and Open Graph to hundreds, perhaps thousands of partners, keeping track of what was going on at those sites looked like an impossible task.

Finally I decided that I was wasting my time.  I have a PhD, it shouldn't be this difficult to understand what is going on with the privacy controls.  Either Facebook is stupid or deliberately making the privacy controls time-consuming and confusing to force people in the direction of sharing more information than they would like.

Why, for example, are the settings for relationships, workplace etc., all separate, so that changing them requires modifying each one individually?  And for the highest level of privacy, why does it require two steps, first clicking on Customize in a dropdown menu, and then on Only Me?  Why does restricting my information so that only My Friends can see it require me to navigate through several different pages, and then at multiple locations on each page, choose My Friends for each of the items, or Customize/Only Me for things I thought no one had any business knowing.

Why isn't there a single dropdown menu or radio box that sets EVERYTHING on the profile, and the wall, at once?  There could be a SINGLE MENU for all information with a set of choices like "Everyone", "Nobody", "Friends" and then for people who wanted to fine tune, there could be a series of nested menus that would allow someone who really cared to drill down and set each element separately.

The only explanation I could imagine was that Facebook in fact wanted to make the process as convoluted as possible in order to encourage errors in the direction of exposing information that people wanted to keep private.

This called to mind the repeated controversies over the last few years that suggested that Facebook had a nasty habit of exposing information without warning, then tightening briefly in response to outcry, and then a few months later quietly loosening again?  For example, I remember at some point last year they made it impossible to hide the friends list.  Previously I was Customizing to prevent display of my friends list to anyone.  But one day I logged in and my friends list was exposed and it was no longer possible to keep it concealed.

At that point, I threw up my hands and decided to delete the account.  I don't mind the lack of privacy associated with being on the internet, but I would at least like to have some idea what is being kept private and what is being exposed.  With Twitter, for example, the controls are pretty easy to understand, because they are simple.  A feed is either public, or protected.  But with Facebook, it was simply no longer possible to understand what was being exposed, and I didn't really understand how to control any of it.  And given Facebook's history, I concluded the confusion was deliberate.  At that point, I decided it was time to say goodbye.

Automated deletion of Facebook wall posts

I have been getting more and more concerned about privacy on Facebook recently.  One concernin  is that Facebook has a nasty habit of abruptly changing its policies without warning, and always seems to move toward making public what I want to keep private, requiring me to tinker repeatedly with the always evolving privacy controls. 

One thing that really cheesed me off last year was that they made it impossible to hide the list of friends.  It isn't clear to me why each of my friends should be able to see a complete list of all the others.  Last year I had a trick worked out that concealed my list of friends from everyone, including my friends, but the 'improvements' last fall broke that trick and made it impossible to conceal my Friend list.

Another concern I have is that my privacy is only as strong as the passwords and account security of everyone on my friend list.  Several people on my list of friends have had their accounts hacked over the last year or so.  It doesn't matter whose fault it is.  The problem is that anyone who hacks their account can in principle go through my entire history of wall posts, and gather a lot of information about my friends and family.  This has been making me increasingly uncomfortable.

The ideal solution would be for Facebook to set some kind of default expiration date for posts so that they are deleted automatically after a certain number of days or weeks.  That way they wouldn't accumulate over time into a complete history of every interaction I have had, every trip I have made, and so forth, that is available to anyone who hacks the account of a friend, or will suddenly be exposed to the entire web if Facebook changes its policies again. 

Facebook, however, seems to go in the opposite direction, making the process of deleting old posts clumsy.  Within Facebook, there is no way I could find of doing a mass delete of old posts.  Removing posts appeared to require going through them one by one, clicking Delete, and then confirming the Delete. 

After some searching, however, I found that someone named Cynthia Perla had developed a script in imacros, a Firefox add-on, that allows for automated deletion of posts.  Basically it will loop through your posts and delete them one by one.  I ended up tweaking the script a bit and posting a new version.  Until Facebook gives us better control over old posts, and allows mass or automatic deletion, this seems to be the best thing around for wiping the slate clean...

Here is the post at the blog that includes the script.  If you scroll down you will see mine...

http://www.cynthiaperla.com/facebook/460/how-to-delete-all-groups-and-wall-posts-from-facebook-using-imacros.html

Note that this requires that whoever uses it is comfortable with working with macros in Firefox.  If you don't know what a macro or a script is, don't bother with this.  I think this is useful mainly for people who are comfortable with installing a Firefox add-on and running scripts and possibly tweaking them a bit.