Sunday, April 5, 2009
Stretches. Patrick got home from martial arts practice. Weight training: shrug, superslow concentration curl. Stretches. Patrick bought groceries for dinner tonight. Brunch at home by myself: deli sandwich. Recently psychobauble and I got CrashPlan working. The initial experience was not very good. Here are the messages I left in their support wiki:
- Frank Farm, 2009/04/04 17:50: I am trying to back up from my computer (Mac OS 10.5.6) to my friend's computer. The connection status says "connected for 4 hours" but the last backup line says "Initial backup not complete"—what do I do now? Thanks!
- Frank Farm, 2009/04/04 17:52: I forgot to mention that the Backup tab says "destination unavailable—not scheduled to run, to do: 1,294 files (33.2 MB), completed: 0 files (0 MB)" and my friend says he opened port 4242 already.
- Frank Farm, 2009/04/05 02:18: My friend changed some settings (backup time was 00:00 to 06:00 and he changed it to anytime, also changed location from a NAS drive to his primary hard drive) and we eventually got it working, but I'd like to mention that it was not a very good first experience for us. The user interface is not very friendly and not easy to figure out. I kept looking for a button that would enable me to manually restart or reattempt the backup but I think it's supposed to be automatic so that's why one doesn't exist, but it's very annoying to want to make it start explicitly and you can't. I think it would be helpful for me to be able to see more feedback about what's happening on my friend's side. e.g., "Your friend has accepted your invitation but has not yet specified a location for your backup." or "Your friend has accepted your invitation and has specified a location for your backup but has restricted backups to occur between midnight and 6:00 AM—the next backup attempt will occur automatically at midnight tonight." or "Your friend needs to open port 4242—see [URL] for instructions on how to do this for his or her platform." This feedback doesn't have to be in sentence structure, but any more information than you are providing now would be very helpful.
Also, JCB received 2 error messages from CrashPlan that he could not figure out: "Not ready for backup from [computername]. Reason: The destination is not available." and "Not ready for backup from [computername]. Reason: The backup location is not accessible." He was backing up his computer to a local external hard drive which is always on and always attached, so these error messages didn't make sense to us. However, the CrashPlan history later indicated that backups were indeed taking place, and the error messages did not recur, so I told him it sounded like it was working and that he just needed to check by attempting to restore a few files to a new folder. CrashPlan's user interface is really way more complicated than it needs to be. I'm thinking of mocking up a new proposed design in Photoshop and posting it to my website. So far, CrashPlan is not as easy to use as I had hoped, but it's still my current recommendation for offsite backup. Hopefully this quirkiness can be ironed out so that it's easier for computer novices to use. More weight training: superslow lateral raise, superslow dumbbell fly. Sunbathed in the backyard. Dinner at home with Danny, Drew, Phil, psychobauble, Nate, Thong B, Thomas G, JCB, Patrick. Patrick cooked shrimp and artichoke bisque, nonspicy jambalaya. Dessert: banana cream pie. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press.