Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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iTunes Libraries - Just a few television series subscriptions will wipe out a 256 GB disk instantly - meaning you are constantly juggling files offline. I carry a lot of 64 GB SD cards.

My "Online Local" Aperture Vault is currently 75 GB. The EOS 7D pictures are 10MB each. I spend a _lot_ of time deleting/moving photos offline, but the CF Flash I put in my camera is 64 GB, So just filling that one up (which I can do in a weekend, without much trouble) would be half of my Aperture Photo collection. Aperture has the ability to store your photos "Offline" on a secondary storage - which is where the majority of my photos are (only thumbnails are kept local)

I've taken some 2 GB Videos with my iPhone. Having a Video SD Card is nice.

VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly. And, you rarely need them in your system.

256 GB is painfully small. 512 GB would be filled up quickly. I could probably get by with 1 TB, with the 3TB Drive on my desk to shuffle off less frequently viewed Video seasons.

The nice thing about SD/USB Flash drives is you can stick them into your laptop, _and leave them there_ without having to futz around with a cable and a separate spinning hard drive. Then, when you don't need the photos/VMware/Video/TV Season - you just swap another one in.

I'd love to have a 128 GB _Fast_ USB Flash drive - those would be awesome.

VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly.

This. I tend to make many snapshots, especially of Windows VMs, since they cannot be reconstructed as quickly as a Linux VM. Virtual machines plus snapshot get big quickly.

Sounds like you want bup which was made for snapshotting vm's without an all new copy being made each time: https://github.com/apenwarr/bup

Disclaimer: Saw the guys presentation at a Git hacking session the other year and was very blown away by the tech involved, very cool stuff.

Why did you decide to prefix the last sentence with "Disclaimer: "?

Because I haven't used it myself, only saw it in action at the presentation.

I want to make snapshots right in VMWare, because it gives the additional advantage that I can quickly switch between them.

E.g. I have snapshots for a clean Windows installs with a different set of development tools.

bup looks like a great tool; thanks for mentioning it.

But ghshephard and danieldk are using VMware, which already creates snapshots using deltas, not entire copies. So their snapshots should already be very efficient.

VMware virtual disks are copy-on-write disks. When you open a VM and start writing to the virtual disk, it creates a new .vmdk (virtual disk) file and writes the changes to that file. (Persistent disks are an exception; changes are written directly to the original .vmdk file.)

When you take a snapshot, it simply freezes the current .vmdk file(s) and starts writing to a new one. It's very quick and efficient. Restoring a snapshot is equally quick and efficient: VMware simply goes back to the .vmdk(s) that make up that snapshot, opens a new scratch .vmdk for further disk writes, and you're ready to go.

You can go back to an old snapshot, make some changes, and save this as a new snapshot. Then you end up with a tree of snapshots, each one using only the disk space needed for the changes that went into that virtual disk.

Of course, even though these delta disks are fairly space-efficient, it still adds up when you use a lot of snapshots!

One trick I use when I create a Linux VM is to create three separate virtual disks for it: a normal .vmdk with snapshot capability for most of the filesystem, plus two smaller nonpersistent .vmdk's for swap and /tmp. I start those two .vmdk's as persistent disks (no snapshot, changes are written directly into the original .vmdk) and then switch them to nonpersistent mode immediately after creating the disks. Nonpersistent disks write their changes to a temporary delta .vmdk when is discarded when the VM is powered down, so writes to /tmp and swap do not go into the snapshots.

I should do this with my Windows VMs too - putting the temp directory and swapfile on nonpersistent disks would help cut down the size of the Windows snapshots.

I think that this is a use case for a NAS, not for flash drive which is designed to be mobile not to store a lot of data.

I don't even own a flash drive (my wife has few, but she needs them in school) I have a single 1TB drive attached to my network, there I store all my data (and rsync it to outside backup). This disk is almost full now and I'll look into buying something bigger.

Why would I need to carry GBs of music/tv shows in my pocket? Just in case I need to watch some episode or listen to that one song right away? :)

There is still no (to my knowledge) killer NAS setup for music.

Everything is slow, or messy, or has a crap interface. Sometimes all three. Then you take your laptop out of your house and you don't have access to any of your music.

iTunes Match is the closest I've gotten. I pay for the upgraded storage and its enough to store my entire music library. Anywhere I go I can listen to anything I own with no delay (assume a decent network connection).

I was under the impression that iTunes Match doesn't eat into your iCloud storage, which is why it's a separate expense.

It doesn't. You're limited to 25,000 of your own (i.e. not purchased from iTunes) songs.

It does if it can't find matches for your tracks. This will happen generally with obscure tracks or live recordings, but sometimes it just fails to match things that are clearly in the iTunes store too.

Does it work abroad, or would you need to use a VPN?

Works fine

(Source: I have a US iTunes account and I'm living in Germany)

I've had a similar experience with Google Music. I have iTunes Match for my iOS/Mac devices, but prefer Google Music as it works on my Android devices and anywhere a decent web browser is. If there was a nice web interface for iTunes Match so my play counts and playlists synced nicely, I'd probably use that, but for now Google Music works.

Bonus benefit of iTunes Match + Google Music is that I can redownload my older iTUnes songs DRM-free so the uploader will pull them in.

I use Subsonic. I stream music locally/remotely to my phone/laptop without a problem.

As do I. I use the MiniSub Chrome app when I'm listening on a desktop computer, the included web interface when I'm importing or curating my library, and iSub on my iPhone/iPad.

I'm only a week or so into this setup, but I'm loving it so far - I really feel like I have control over my music once again, vs. Spotify which I'm planning to downgrade to the free edition.

My Synology NAS coupled with a Squeeze Box service is fantastic.

The Synology NAS does include the Squeeze Box service software that can easily be streamed and played seamlessly on your PC or on a physical Squeeze Box server.

My wife and I utilize box in our house and have had zero issues with network latency, file indexing, and general performance.

A NAS is obviously the better option if you're always working in the same location, but for people like me who often move between locations it's much more convenient to use one or two large flash drives.

For instance it's much easier for me to keep my VMWare images and snapshots on a flash drive and back that up to a home disk once a day, because it means I can use the images wherever I happen to be. Mostly that's just between home and the office, but that's not always the case.

I have the regular assortment of (multiple) generations of NAS devices at home and in the office as well. But, when you want to go throw that Windows 7 image onto VMware and use it for a few days, or you want to do some editting of your family vacation photos, or you happen to be on a business trip to brazil, it's _really_ nice to be able to just pop a USB/SSD into your laptop and edit/view a way. I sync back to my external drive/NAS when I get back into the office/home.

For those of us who travel for extended periods of time, USB/SSD Flash Drives are a nice alternative to external Hard Drives and/or spending a fortune on Internal Drives w/Apple

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