Migrating to ExFAT

Migrating to ExFAT

Byrichard

While on one of my numerous walks I heard about ExFAT being compatible between windows, macOS and Linux so I was tempted to experiment with the file system. I heard this while listening to a podcast as I often do.

When I was on an iBook, or a Mac Book Pro, or a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Book Air I could be on APFS and Mac OS Journaled but as I slid to windows during the early days of the pandemic, and back to Linux last year, so the need for a file format that is compatible with all systems became more interesting.

Sliding Between Windows Mac OS, and Linux

The issue that I have at the moment is that my Windows drive is full and I didn’t have an NTFS drive to clear the space from that drive. As a result that computer has been limited for a long while. By consolidating data from MacOS Journaled drives to an ExFAT drive, and then migrating that data off the drives with limited use I can free up space to remove files from the windows machine, and regain more freedom.

 Mac Book Pros Die

The other concern is that my Mac Book Pro is from 2016 and I have already had to replace the battery once so I expect it to die within a few months, or within the year. When it dies I don’t want to be stuck with drives that I can’t access anymore. If I remove all that data from APFS to ExFAT drives then I will retain acccess to it, without having to spend 500 CHF on a minimum spec machine.

I have had two hardware failures on one Mac Book Pro, and one on the mac I’m using now. The bottom half was replaced due to a failure related to the battery being old and depleted.

No Longer Supported by Apple

By Autumn of this year my Mac Book Pro will no longer be supported by Apple, which I see as a fantastic opportunity to migrate over to Ubuntu or another Linux distribution. It’s absurd to do this while a Mac is supported, due to the cost of the device, but once it is abandonned I can take some liberties.

ZFS

If I could experiment with the file system of my choice then I would be moving everything over to ZFS rather than ExFAT because it sounds like a great option due to snapshots, backup tools and more. The drawback is that Windows and Mac OS have limited access to this file system.

The other drawback is that ZFS has a learning curve which I have not embarked upon yet, so I can’t switch to this file system until I understand how to use it.

And Finally

Initially I had considered that Fat32 was the only option but thanks to the podcast episode I learned that ExFAT was flexible, and that’s precisely what I wanted. If you buy new hard drives you will find that they are now formatted as ExFAT, rather than Fat32. Part of this is due to Windows deciding to open up the file format. If I did not misunderstand ExFAT was designed for digital video and photo cameras to make their files as easy to transfer as possible.

And Finally, by choosing ExFat, rather than NTFS, Mac OS Journalled, APFS or Ext4 I ensure that I have maximum flexibility with certain drives and files. It ensures that I can slide between windows, mac and Linux, without worrying about moving files around.

Immich and iPhone Storage
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Immich and iPhone Storage

Byrichard

When experimenting with the Immich iPhone app I found it impossible to upload beyond 15,000 images and I supposed that it was because the phone timed out before it had checked all the previous files before moving on to the last four thousand images. In reality the problem is that Immich downloads the media from iCloud and leaves it on the phone. The result is that if you have one hundred gigabytes of photos on iCloud you need one hundred gigabytes of storage ony your phone.

I only came across this after several attempts. I realised that it was a storage issue because another app said “Phone memory is low, please clear some data, or something to this effect. As this is my old phone I could clear files from other apps to make sense for iCloud to download the last of my photos, to be synced with Immich.

A few hours later I had downloaded and synced all iCloud photos to Immich. I can now delete iCloud images and have plenty of space for future growth. I have the 200 gigabyte plan so it doesn’t really matter.

iCloud and iPhones

My second to last phone as an iPhone 8 plus with 256 gigabytes of ram but the next one was an iPhone SE 2 with 128 gigs of ram. The reason for the downgrade in storage is simple. Two hundred gigabytes with Apple costs 3 CHF per month whereas 2 terabytes is 10 CHF per month. The cost per gigabyte makes the 2 terabyte plan more interesting but the difficulty of retrieving data makes the plan uninteresting. You end up paying 120 CHF per year until you find a way to retrieve that data.

The Shift from Self-Storage to Online Storage

Many years ago Google had Picasa, and Apple had and still have iPhoto. Both apps expected you to store your files locally. With time, as people shifted to laptops so the amount of storage available on devices declined. That’s why Picasa enabled cloud storage, and why Google Photos and iPhotos allow you to backup to the cloud and clear space on mobile devices. With android devices it’s easy to add a miniSD card up to two terabytes. With iOS, but also with MacOS devices getting more storage costs hundreds of francs more.

With Apple you pay 1 CHF per month for 50GB, 3 CHF per month for 200GB, 10 CHF for 2TB, 30 CHF for 6TH and 60CHF for 12TB. By dumping my photos from iCloud to Immich I can downgrade my iCloud plan from 200GB for 3CHF per month to 50 GB for a symbolic franc per month.

iCloud Photos use 135 gigabytes of storage out of 185 gigabytes of storage.

Local Storage and Cloud Storage

If you have one hundred and fourty gigabytes of photos then you need a phone with at least 140 gigabytes of storage but the SE has just 128 gigabytes of storage. The laptop has about 256 gigabytes if I remember correctly.

This means that if you store two terabytes of photos in the cloud you need a two terabyte drive to recover them, whether on your phone or your laptop. Since this costs thousands of francs it makes more sense to have a solution such as Immich, Nextcloud and photosync and Photoprism.

I believe that both Nextcloud and Photosync download photos from iCloud, upload them to their respective services and remove them, whereas Immich downloads them and keeps them in place. With Immich you need to have enough storage on your mobile phone whereas the others adapt.

And Finally

Immich did not give an error message. It just got stuck so I tried over and over without success. It’s because another app said that I had run out of space that I was able to resolve the issue and accomplish my goal of transferring files from iPhoto/iCloud to Immich.

Now is the time to evaluate Nextcloud Immich, and Photoprism over a number of days.

Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

Experimenting with Nextcloud and A Raspberry Pi 4

Byrichard

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.


Transfer screen
Transfer screen


Use Case


It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.


You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.


What it does


It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.


With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.


How to Break Things


– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device


– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.


– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local


– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.


– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.


– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.


Why This Solution is Interesting


The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.


With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.


It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.


And Finally


If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.

A Simple iPhone – iCloud solution

A Simple iPhone – iCloud solution

Byrichard

A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.


I wouldn’t mind paying this much, if it was easier to retrieve this data. Once data is on iCloud and plenty of services it is a nuissance to retrieve. If you think “I can expand it for a few weeks then you’re right, you can. It’s when you want to recover the data that you will get blocked. iCloud doesn’t allow a photo library to be spread across multiple drives, so either you have everything on a single volume, or you’re trapped paying for decades to come.


Now for the simple solution I hadn’t considered until last night. A lower capacity iPhone. With a 256 gigabyte phone you need ten terabytes of storage to backup the entire phone, but with a 126 gigabyte phone you sneak under the 200 gigabyte limit with ease. The cost of a new phone is relatively high, but consider that you’re saving 81 CHF per year, and several hundred francs on a mobile phone.


Next time you consider an iPhone consider the size of the phone compared to your laptop hard drive, as well as the cost of cloud storage and backup. The bigger the phone, the larger the yearly tax. Keep it to 200 gigabytes and the tax is 39 CHF per year, expand it to two terabytes and it’s 120 CHF per year. Retrieving the data is not straight forward. I will stick to smaller capacity phones, to avoid hitting the 200 gigabyte limit in future.



KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

Byrichard

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.


With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.


Simple Synchronisation


With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.


Google One


With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.


iCloud and Price


Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.


KDrive


KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.


Features


In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.


I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.


Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.


For more information about KDrive. The Prices.


And Finally


Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.


KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.