What are your current obsessions?

[Adam H]

Anyone used Time2 security Kits ? Looking for a reasonably priced wireless security system which gives phone alerts etc. This seems to be perfect, just wondering if anyone has used time2 before ?

https://www.time2technology.com/en/...r-wifi-home-security-camera-hd-720p-html.html

 

[ian]

Anyone used Time2 security Kits ? Looking for a reasonably priced wireless security system which gives phone alerts etc. This seems to be perfect, just wondering if anyone has used time2 before ?

https://www.time2technology.com/en/...r-wifi-home-security-camera-hd-720p-html.html

No but 720p in this day and age is poor; as is some of their specification answers "warranty"......."yes".

 

[Adam H]

No but 720p in this day and age is poor; as is some of their specification answers "warranty"......."yes".

Any recommendations for alternatives that have the same features ( and around that kind of pricing )

 

[Edwin]

Anyone used Time2 security Kits ? Looking for a reasonably priced wireless security system which gives phone alerts etc. This seems to be perfect, just wondering if anyone has used time2 before ?

https://www.time2technology.com/en/...r-wifi-home-security-camera-hd-720p-html.html

Seems like a lot of these wireless CCTV devices (talking about the product category generally - not necessarily this one) have been found to have huge security flaws. For example:
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/security-camera-risk-av-test,news-24292.html

 

[bulkcorn]

I don't think any of you could survive where I live, it's like prehistoric times here, but I like it that way

When using the toilet, I have to go round the back of the house and fill a bucket and another container with water to flush the toilet with. There is no mains water here, everything comes from an old open well, and that water is a urine colour lol, even after going through a filter. It's only used for washing and is not drinkable, so I get all my drinking/cooking water delivered in 5 litre bottles from Tesco.

As for high tech stuff, I've got a Huawei wireless hub on Three, sometimes the signal is ok, other times it's slowwwww or non existent, welcome to Ireland

You are living the life ...... !

That said, what do you use the urine-colored water to 'wash'?

 

[ausername]

I need to stop watching Ancient Aliens

Personally I think you need to rewatch all 135 episodes from all 12 seasons, on my website

 

[ausername]

Doing a bit of market research at the minute with a view to entering a competitive market with a bit of a fresh marketing angle, and notice that 'green' and 'eco-friendly' seems to be dying off.... at one point everybody was flogging green this, green that. All eco-friendly forums are dead as a dodo, has 'green living' become unfashionable with middle class people from Highgate and Didsbury, or have we just reached the point where we're all becoming more eco-friendly through innovation and regulation anyway?

Perhaps so many people have solar panels and electric cars now that it isn't enough to boast about your Toyota Prius and the system on the top of your house which converts rainwater into toilet water?

Or its all still there bubbling away, but the terminology is evolving and moving away from 'Green' and 'Eco-friendly' and 'Green living'.

I follow 'crowdfunding' and angel investment sites a lot, the equity sort (UK and USA) and not many pitches for 'green' things, a few years ago every other new product was 'green' something. That's my observation.

Electric car companies the obvious exception to the thing above about investment pitches, loads of those trying to raise money.

 

[ausername]

Oh god, how embarrassing.

I read 'obsessions' as 'observations', hence my long post about an observation.

Need a 'loser' reaction on here to go with 'winner'

 

[ian]

Any recommendations for alternatives that have the same features ( and around that kind of pricing )

Not a lot unless you hard wire, then Nest do a decent product etc. It depends though, if you are happy with a local hard drive storage unit, there are more options from obscure companies, but if you want cloud based recording, then hopefully the major players like Arlo, Nest etc will launch a 1080p wireless solution in the next few months...they are seriously behind the times with these.

 

[TallBloke]

I back up via Mac OS time machine to an external HDD. The problem with that is as @Edwin alludes to is that it's not off-site.

So what are suitable options?

Backblaze at $60/yr
Dropbox
Apple / Google / Amazon
A fireproof safe and a second HDD used in rotation
Something else?

I value my photos the most. I'm not keen on using free google photo storage because you can bet they can/will analyse photos, glean information and have even more data about me.

 

[RobM]

Digitalocean are providing storage solutions quite cheap now - as it's object storage I guess you can't read and write to it daily and it's meant for backups. $5 per month for 250Gb storage and 1 Tb outgoing bandwidth (so 4 times full amount download per month). If you are paranoid could get a couple in different countries. Also it's new and therefore free until Feb I think. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/object-storage/

 

[Edwin]

I back up via Mac OS time machine to an external HDD. The problem with that is as @Edwin alludes to is that it's not off-site.

So what are suitable options?

Backblaze at $60/yr
Dropbox
Apple / Google / Amazon
A fireproof safe and a second HDD used in rotation
Something else?

I value my photos the most. I'm not keen on using free google photo storage because you can bet they can/will analyse photos, glean information and have even more data about me.

Here's what I have:
- Second internal hard drive, to which I automatically copy all changed files once an hour (in case my data drive dies)
- Networked NAS device in a different part of the house, to which I automatically copy all changed files every twelve hours (hopefully might survive a very "localised" fire even if it took out my computer)
- Backblaze remote backup (does continuous incremental backups)
- Backupify to back up my Google Calendar, Contacts and Gmail (it's rare, but there have been horror stories in the past about Google accounts becoming corrupt and Google being unable to restore them; I have thousands of calendar entries and over 10,000 email I want to save)

The problem with any remote backup solution (not unique to Backblaze) is that, when you first join them, it could take weeks or months to store the first backup image, because most internet providers have asymmetric download/upload speeds and the quantity of data's so big. I had about 1.2TB at the time, and from memory I think it took about 13 days to upload to Backblaze.

That's why I have never cancelled my previous remote backup solution (used to use Mozy, then Crashplan before settling on Backblaze) until after the first full backup was registered at my new remote backup service.

Be careful, a lot of the photo hosting services "helpfully" compress your photos for you automatically i.e. they never actually store a copy of the unaltered files, especially at the free service level. You may never notice if you're just looking on a screen, but they won't be the same size/quality as they were coming out of the camera.

 

[Edwin]

Oh, and you can save money on Backblaze if you're willing to pay up front for longer periods:
- $5 a month
- $50 a year
- $95 for 2 years
https://secure.backblaze.com/buy.htm

 

[RobM]

Does backblaze sync? I use dropbox at the moment for some files that I change every hour or so but it's pricey I think.

 

[Edwin]

Does backblaze sync? I use dropbox at the moment for some files that I change every hour or so but it's pricey I think.

What do you mean by sync? It does incremental backups, if that's what you mean?

 

[RobM]

I meant the second I save a file the new save is uploaded to dropbox. So I have a mixture of backed up files that I don't change (photos etc) and files I'm changing currently (work related).

 

[Edwin]

I meant the second I save a file the new save is uploaded to dropbox. So I have a mixture of backed up files that I don't change (photos etc) and files I'm changing currently (work related).

I don't think it goes quite that far. It certainly does back up stuff continuously, and it retains multiple versions of a given file (up to 30 days).

Perhaps a good bet would be a mix of Dropbox for the super-duper-important up to the second documents, plus Backblaze for everything else?

 

[wonder_lander]

My solution is the same as Edwin but I also run Veeam Agent for Windows on all my client backups so that I can do bare metal restores of any client. The Veeam backups land on my core server and are offloaded to Crashplan each day.

 

[Skinner]

Less than ideal, but Amazon's prime photo offering (included with all prime memberships), offers free unlimited storage for all images, full resolution and even RAW image format. I have a my synology photo backup server uploading nightly, just another layer to protect photos. The £55 a year to store videos as well maybe another seemless layer.

I spoke to someone from Amazon at a trade show, they were pretty positive that Amazon could (and would) move a copy of the photo's account over to glacier or other cold storage without a problem.

I'm still stuck on ADSL, fibre in my area is dismal, my neighbour gets 2mb down less an me, but 4x faster upstream, and cable just isn't happening. They crossed a line with deep packet inspection and various other invasions of privacy and breaching of rights.

@Edwin why not Raid 1 ? Surely Raid 1 would be better than having your machine dupe every hour eating resources. You'll also get a read speed increase and 0 loss (altho 1 hour is approaching 0 for the most part).

 

[Edwin]

I did think about Raid, but it seemed like overkill. My data is important to me, but not particularly prolific.

Besides, since it's only an incremental backup not a full backup it takes a few seconds normally. As for speed, my documents are all on SSD anyway and given the constraints of my PC's slightly elderly motherboard I don't think I could squeeze any more speed out of it because the SATA2 interface is the capacity constraint, not the speed of the hard drive (or in this case the SSD).

I have a second internal drive (a hard drive this time) - ok, technically a third drive if you count the backup one as well - for larger stuff I touch very rarely, such as photos and music and so on.