Remote Sync using PogoPlug
I am using PogoPlug as a remote backup solution. I volunteer at a charitable organization which has considerable amount of media, which required a remote backup.
I use a Drobo that is hooked up to the PogoPlug. It works great. I then put Pogoplug’s driver on the Windows 2008 file server in the headquarter. This creates network drives on the server that is mapped to my PogoPlug drives. I then use SyncToy on the file server to sync the various directories to my PogoPlug drives.
While this works reasonably well, I noticed that there are some directories that always were said to be required syncing but I failed to find what were different between the 2 ends. SyncToys has some option to determine the algorithm use to detect changes. By default, it simply checks to file size, access/update time to determine if it needs to sync the files.
I tried the option to check the file content to determine if a file needs to be updated. This proves to be too resource intensive as it needs to read the entire remote file to determine a checksum for comparison purpose. With my setup, this takes way too long to complete (I have close to 2TB worth of data, many of them are video files).
I am trying out Unison (from UPENN) and Rsync. Rsync is interesting in that a local server on the PogoPlug is required (and it exists in the OpenPogo site). While I haven’t try it out yet, it seems to me such a solution might be a good one for such kind of remote syncing.
The client side can calculate the local checksum while the remote server side can calculate the checksum locally as well. Then it would be simple to compare and they don’t even have to be synchronized.
I will report back with my findings…
PogoPlug 2.x, after much effort…
Pogoplug 2.x has been pushed to users for about 2+ months by now. Initially, there was a lot of problems with its new feature to make photos and videos be previewable on its web interface. However, if you have a lot of media on your drives, then you might run into problems.
I have a 1 TB Mybook USB2 drive and a Drobo v2 attached to it. The Drobo itself have about 2TB worth of media, as this is a remote backup copy of media assets of my volunteer group. While trying to encode the preview segments, the PogoPlug become so overloaded (after all, it doesn’t have a very powerful processor) that it frequently dropped the drives.
Pogoplug would report that there was no drives attached to the device. Unplugging and replugging helped for a while for it to recognize that something is attached, but it would refused to show its content. After a short while, it would say that there were no drives again.
I ended up deleting the .cedata (which PogoPlug keeps its configuration data as well as the cache for the preview segments of the media it has encoded). After doing so, the PogoPlug essentially thinks that the drive is ‘new’ to it. I quickly disable the preview generation on all the drives. It was then ‘stable’.
However, I noticed that I cannot access some directory properly. I ended up running chkdsk on all the drives to make sure that the NTFS directores were not screw up by all the plugging and unplugging. Chkdsk did find a few problems which it fixed. After that, accessing those directories on the Pogoplug were fine.
I have to say, during these frustrated hours, Pogoplug’s forum has been very helpful. Also, the developers are quite responsive to requests and suggestions.
I do love this device. It is not quite perfect yet, but it serves its purpose very well.
