Welcome! Windows Bug in Storage Spaces plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

[00:00:00] This is probably one of the most requested shows ever. We’re going to talk about online collaboration. We’ll the stuff that’s needed, absolutely needed for working from home. So stick around for the whole show. We got a lot to talk about.

Of course, you’re listening to Craig Peterson. I am so glad you’re here. Online Craig peterson.com. In fact, that’s where I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from you guys. I want to thank everybody that sent me a note, talking about the types of things you want to learn more about. Today that’s precisely what we will be talking about.

We’re going to go through the top online collaboration tools that are out there. We’ll be talking about WebEx, which is by far my most favorite. It’s what we use because of the security, the flexibility. But we’re going to get into that. We’re going to talk about Zoom and that’s what we used for my daughter’s wedding couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:00] Why would we use that? What it’s so insecure. We’re going to get into zoom’s biggest features. Microsoft Teams is a fairly new player on the block, but we’re going to talk about them and the pros and cons.

Then the granddaddy of them all. We’re going to be talking about, Gotomeeting. They’ve been around a very long time. They have pros, they have cons. We’re going to be talking about that as well.

We have a number of articles to get to in this week’s news. But we’ll see just how far we can get with some of those things. But there are two things we have to get to right now at the top of the show. And one of them is about the latest windows 10 upgrade that they came up with.

Now, the May updates are starting to roll out, in a little bit better speed. Now, if you can believe it here we are the middle of June and the Windows 10th of May. It’s starting to roll out to everybody because of all of the problems. Unfortunately, that’s the big problem we’re seeing right now with windows 10, version 2004.

[00:02:00] Now, if you have a computer, one of the best things you can do for that computer to. protect your data from a crash, not from the bad guys, but from a crash is to have something called RAID, which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. The idea here behind raid is that you can have more multiple disc drives and it will store the data on those multiple disc drives, but it stores it in such a way that if a block goes bad on one of those drives, it can pull that block from another drive because essentially it keeps two copies of all of the data, technically. It’s not really two copies, but we don’t need to get into that right now.

[00:03:00] So if you lose a whole desk or you lose a part of a desk, even as small as one block, hopefully, it can be recovered. Now there are a lot of different types of raid out there. Many of them are done in hardware and can provide you with some really great defense. Those are the ones I’ve been using for probably about 30 years now.

Now with my customers, but there’s something else that I’ve been using for almost as long ever since it came out, it was developed by Sun Microsystems and it’s a file system called ZFS. Now. It’s absolutely amazing. It is continually, every time you read that disc, it is checking the checksums, see if anything might be wrong with it, if there’s anything wrong with it, it recovers that block because there’s something known as bitrot when we’re talking about computers and discs and even memory, frankly, but particularly with disks.

[00:04:00] That is over time mathematically, we can figure out how much of that data you haven’t changed that is stored there, the emails, but more importantly, things like your accounting files, et cetera. How just individual bits can decay, literally decay, because remember they’re magnetic, remember they’re on magnetic media. Nowadays that magnetic media is usually on a piece of glass.

That’s sitting inside that disc drive decays, the problem is that the numbers change. So you can have something that says a million dollars and because of bit rot, it changes too. Again, good change to zero, right? because just one bit flips from a one to a zero. That’s all it takes. You could lose data storage because a bit flips inside your directory structure. You can lose bits on the disks at any time and they do decay over time.

[00:05:00] I remember there’s a French aerospace manufacturer who we put a proposal to, and I did all of the math. I showed all of the research or some great Ph.D. research that I had found that showed how over time, regular raid devices are not going to help them with longterm retention of the data. They made parts for airplane engines and they had to keep all of the data, all of the scans, the X rays, everything they did, they had to keep it for decades. As long as that blade that was in that turbofan for that engine for a plane, as long as that blade was out there in the field, in use, they had to keep all of the original data.

I showed them all of the studies, cause I knew what they were looking at. They were looking at just standard grade stuff, Hitachi data systems and some others and, pretty high end, very expensive hardware.

[00:06:00] I showed how they, it was impossible for them to keep that data longterm. If they put it into a normal raid system. I proposed, this was some years back, but I proposed a system, where there multiple machines, and each machine had what was called the ZFS, which is a Zelda file system on it. Then on top of all of those machines was another distributed file system and I showed how they would not ever lose any data for decades and decades.

Now they’d have to replace just drives as they went bad and we have the system set up, so it would inform them about a bad drive so they could replace it. They could actually lose three drives with an each one of these data set handlers, just a fantastic system. It is the type of system we’ve been using for our clients forever, because nowadays just under the federal rules of civil procedure that every business has to follow you have to have plans in place to keep things like the purchase orders, the bills you send out, even emails have to be retained longterm. IRS and others require you to have retention policies in place and to keep that data and you can’t do that with raid for longterm.

[00:07:00] I brought all of this up because of what Microsoft is doing right now with windows 10, version 2004. Microsoft introduced something that is patterned after this ZFS that I talked about and ZFS is just phenomenal.

I typically use the Z-two or Z-three, for those of you that are really technical and know what that means, in order to help keep the data safe. And then. Of course, I encrypt it all push it up into cloud storage, which also has raid, but guaranteed, the data will never be lost. So Microsoft said all this is just wonderful. They came up with their own version. Apple came up with a version as well. They started to use ZFS. Then when Sun Microsystems went under basically their technology was acquired, and this particular ZFS technology, I think Oracle that managed to glom onto it.

[00:08:00] There wouldn’t be licensing issues. Apple said, okay, we got to do our own thing. So Apple has some very cool advanced file system that is on the SSDs that are in so many of our machines today. So there’s a lot of cool stuff.

Microsoft has storage spaces. Now I don’t trust it. I never trusted it. I always use ZFS even in the Linux world where they’ve come up with their own version of the software. That’s patterned after ZFS. ZFS has just been around for so long and is just so stable, that’s what I use. Cause it’s available. Really everything out there. But this particular thing I’m talking about storage spaces, a feature on Windows and Windows server, and it supports systems with multiple drives and lots of users put those drives together into bundles and create a pool of storage that you can then use to store your stuff.

[00:09:00] The idea is if a disc goes bad, just like raid, just like ZFS if a disc goes bad you can recover. Now, one of the beauties of the systems we’ve designed for our clients over the years on ZFS and you can do this yourself, if you’re a little bit more advanced is, as I said. You can guarantee the data never goes bad because every time it’s read, it is checked.

Now, if you’re using hardware raid or some of these other storage systems that combined disks, it’s rare that it’s ever checked. Ever checked.

So you can check to make sure that raid array is working properly, but you cannot check that the data in that array has not been damaged. Maybe it was damaged by the raid controller itself, or the disc drive or the cashing function on the disc drive, or it lost the power at the exact wrong time. Now you lost even more of that data.

[00:10:00] Microsoft has come to yet, a new low. Should we call it a new low? Why not? Okay. A new low. It turns out that their storage spaces software that’s designed to keep your data safe. Apparently can mess up all of your data. How’s that for fun?

And that’s particularly from windows 10, version 2004, Microsoft apparently didn’t bother testing it or at least testing it thoroughly enough. According to these articles, I’m seeing online, like right now, I’m looking at one from ZDNet. It’s saying, when using some configurations partitioned first storage spaces might show as raw in disk manager. Microsoft has advised against running the check disk command on any device affected by this issue because fixing your desk is going to make things even worse.

[00:11:00] Oh my gosh. So if you’re using storage spaces wise up, get something better. Secondly, don’t upgrade yet. It’s just the May release. It’s not out there yet.

Anyway, stick around guys. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Craig Peterson and we’ve got a whole lot more coming up and yes, we’re going to get to collaboration. I guarantee.

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Welcome! Windows Bug in Storage Spaces plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

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