New Blog Look Coming and Our Data Storage

As some of you may have seen from time to time over the past few weeks, we have been testing a new blog theme that we have been working on developing for our site. Happy to report that it is almost done and we hope to be able to make it live for good next week sometime.  Just a few more bugs to work out. We figured it was about time for a face lift and set out to come up with a look that goes more with the Outside Our Bubble logo colors. And seeing we are starting our new life of being full timers, we figured it would be a good time to update the site and give it a new life.

One thing that we have been asked about from some of you that know us, is what did we end up doing with our main file server we used at our home with all our TV shows and movies? Well, the old fifteen drive 16.5 Terabyte server is with us.  And by that I mean currently it is riding along in the basement now not being used. Why? Few reasons. Space, noise and heat.  But no fear, read on.

(Side Note – Terabyte:  1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 10¹²bytes = 1,000 gigabytes.   You may have an 8GB SD card in your camera as an example and to put it into perspective.)

A fifteen drive server is not only very large, but makes quite a bit of sound and heat.  While it being a heater would be a good thing as the winter months are coming, it surely is not welcome right now. And even though we did have a space all picked out for it to go in the TOUR we did not purchase, where it would have fit nicely, we surely did not have a space for it our current coach. So it went under the counter/desk in the main coach area along with a UPS and that brought the sound and heat that comes with such a large server.  You might ask, “why a UPS?”  You know how you NEVER really want a computer to just loose power without being shut down?  Much more worse for a file server. Thus the UPS even though we have the instant on inverter. (UPS = Uninterrupted Power Supply that runs off battery for backup power.)

Seeing David was busy with all that was happening with the messed up Winnebago purchase and everything else we were dealing with, David asked for some help on a community forum and Gary stood up and offered. Together they worked out the specs of the server and the parts were ordered and Gary did the build and the testing. The hard part was we then needed to be somewhere long enough to receive it from Texas. But it all worked out nicely.

Oh, I bet someone is asking… “What do we do with all that storage?  Why do we need such a thing?” Ah, remember we are talking about David here. Our entire life is stored on this little box. From all our business and personal records, to ten’s of thousands of photos, and all our music and videos. It’s all in one little box ready to

be used with the click of the remote. If I need any of our records, they are all on the server. All the way back seven years of personal and business records, all in digital PDF format. Much easier to store all those records in digital format vs paper and even more important when you now live in a motor coach. We used the company Docufree.com that converts paper records into digital ones that are all perfectly legal for taxes etc.

And no worries, the server is backed up within itself. The server runs on a operating system from LimeTech using unRAID for backup and safety. It is this OS that runs the server and allows us to access all the data.  If one of the drives fails, it’s contents can be rebuilt from the parity drive once a new drive is installed. All automatically. Simple as that.