At home I have a HTPC with some SMB shares for Music and Videos. Much to my annoyance my beloved macbook insisted on creating .DS_Store files on these shares whenever I used them. That is, until I found out how to prevent it doing so.

Open Terminal.app, type the following and hit return

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Ahh, much better.
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After 3 years of part time development I’ve released version 2 of my product key finder. The project started as an internal tool I wrote to isolate which licenses staff were using at the company I worked for at the time.

This application will not generate license keys, it will recover them from your system. It will not help you pirate software.

Version 2.0 adds some important new functionality:

• Support for the Windows x64 registry (including recovery of x64 Windows license keys);
• A GUI rather than command line application;
• Support for 20 more applications including Quickbooks 16, Adone InDesign CS2, TurboTax and F-Secure;
• Initial groundwork for loading offline registry hives for license recovery – I just need a willing tester or two.

This is also the most tested release, having been tested on Windows NT4, 98, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and 2008. If anyone has the Windows 7 RC (build >=7100) let me know if it works!

Unfortunately, CSV Input (the ability to specify your own detection methods) is no longer available due to lack of use.

You can download Product Key Finder here.

For the last 3 years I’ve had a Buffalo Terastation (HD-HTGL) at home storing photos from my Nikon D200 SLR, my music collection, films, documents and so on. I’d configured it with RAID5 which left me with just under 750Gb storage capacity. This meant that if one drive failed it’d continue on with degraded functionality.

I’d left it unplugged for a few weeks as I’d rewired some of the house and not had chance to sort out the connectivity to it. When I got around to turning it on the drive failure light started flashing and the device wasn’t exporting any of the smb shares or allowing access via http / telnet. “No problem” I thought and a few days later the replacement drive I ordered arrived.

With the drive replaced and the device booted up, the shares were still not visible. Thankfully I could get at the web interface so went ahead and restructured the array as instructed by the now working web interface.

12 hours later the device wasn’t even accessible from the network (other than intermittent ping responses). Ohh dear.

After a day or so of trying everything under the sun to get it working I’ve now got the drives hooked up to an old desktop and am trying to recover the data with UFS Explorer. Thankfully, I’ve managed to get back the majority of my financial documents. I had a copy of my music collection on my laptop (which I’d copied over a week earlier). However, all the photos I’ve taken with my Nikon D200 over the last 4 years are gone.

In a business environment we can back up all our data onto LTO4 media and be fairly confident we’re covered. What are we supposed to do at home though? – How is the consumer supposed to backup 1Tb of data?

Needless to say, I wont be buying a consumer NAS again. I’ll probably build my own Micro-ITX box and RAID1 two 1Tb drives. At least then I’ll be able to get access to the data on the device if one of the drives dies!

If anyone has any suggestions as to how to backup 1Tb of data, let me know!