iCloud Alter Egos, Dock Duplicates, and Synology's Shenanigans

Tap and hold the timer button in the control center and a slider will appear on your screen. Move your finger up or down on the slider to increase or decrease the duration in one minute increments and tap start to begin. More tips like this plus your question answered today on Mac GeekGab 1089 for Monday, May 12th, 2025. We'll be right back.

Our sponsors for this week include square.com slash go slash MGG, where you can get up to 200 bucks off of Square hardware when you sign up there.

Coda.io slash mgg where you can have one doc to rule them all and get six months of the team plan for startups for free and also a new sponsor caldera lab.com slash mgg don't settle for drugstore junk and you can save 20% on your first order using code mgg at checkout we'll talk more about all of that in a minute for now here in Durham New Hampshire as usual I'm Dave Hamilton

for whatever reason uh i could not on my synology and we have more things to say about synology today uh On my Synology, I could not set a quota on the volume for her time machine backups, nor could I set a quota on her user account for these time machine backups. And I have some theories as to why I rolled this volume back from a newer unit. And I think I got myself in a coffin corner of sorts where both things are sort

of fighting with each other. But in any event, I'm like, well, wait a minute. Mac OS also now lets you set a quota for your time machine backups. And so I went in and it the smallest it would let me set for her was two and a half terabytes. And she has about 800 gigs worth of storage used on this particular computer. I'm like, two and a half terabytes, that's more than I care to allocate to it. I don't feel like it's excessive, but it's more than I want. I want to do about one and a half.

But you can't change it once, and it wouldn't let me go lower than that on the user interface.

So I got it all set up, and then I did some searching, and i found out that you can use uh from the terminal there is a generic command that does everything with time machine from the terminal called tmutil and if you uh if you there is a sub command of it called set quota and so i did uh the first thing you have to do is uh tmutil Destination info and i'll put all this in uh in the show notes so that and you get your disk id from there and then you

use tmutil set quota with the disk id and how many gigabytes you want so i set it to 1500 gigabytes and it worked it gave me an error the first time because it was i guess still setting the volume up saying you can't do this on on network stores you can only do it on and local storage, but I tried it again later anyway, once all was said and done, and it absolutely let me do it and it worked just fine.

So the tmutil command can take care of that for you with its set quota, whatever, you know, set quota sub command, whatever you're supposed to call that. I don't know, it's too early in the morning. I can't think of any of this stuff, but yeah, yeah, I know. I was super stoked that that just worked. The commands are in nice

seen time machine get itself into a scenario where it doesn't have, it doesn't think it has enough room to juggle things out and still sort of get you to where you need to be. So my solution to that is increase your quota temporarily, let it do its thing, and then bring the quota back down and see if that resolves it. If it doesn't, then it's time to make a new time machine backup.

that's what the agenda says anyway. Joe wrote in with a great tip, and man, I liked it. He says, one of those things that people probably know but may not use often because they forgot I had one of those hit me today. I was looking for a unique email that I could create with naming that I wanted to define and ideally would be an iCloud email. I first thought to just create a new Apple ID, but that was going to be a pain because I have to enter a new Apple ID and mail and track that.

And looking for an answer on the web, I had completely forgotten about Apple email alias. Turns out, every Apple ID is allowed to have up to three, count them, three email aliases associated with the same account. So I simply went into iCloud Mail on the web, clicked the little gear box, and selected Email Alias, creating a name of my making, and boom! All of a sudden, I had a new email with an iCloud extension that routes to my existing email accounts.

It's sort of like a self-assigned hide my email feature that can be turned off as needed anyway something folks probably have known about for years but something that's easy to forget keep up the great work joe from raleigh and when he when i first started reading this i thought well he's talking about hide my email but he's not there's there's email aliases it's like okay, so not only did i not forget about it joe i didn't even know about it and now

i do so so we have it uh And the one thing I noticed is that I will say, when you go into email on the web for iCloud, look up at the 10 o'clock position from the word inbox, and you'll find that little gear. And when it comes up, click on settings, then account, and then you have the ability to add your alias. And you can turn them on and off, change them. I think once you hit your three, you have to start deleting them to change to another one. Awesome. that was cool yeah yeah.

want to know what's that he says not sure why it took me this long to notice but if you put your cursor on the vertical dividing line in the mac dock. The cursor changes to up and down arrows, and you can quickly click and drag up or down to increase or decrease the size of the dock. My aging eyes appreciate this. Wish I'd known sooner. Love your podcast. A long time listener, Roy.

height especially on my laptop so that's how i moved to with the you know that squeeze man and so that's why i moved my dock off to the side and and now i have you know more full height stuff going on that might be a byproduct of having about it i

And I'd much rather spend four hours trying to get a piece of software to work that's going to do it for me than spend the 10 minutes to do it manually. Obviously, obviously.

Then I recalled a sort of lightly documented feature using Apple Contacts and Numbers. Shorthand, let's call in drag and drop. All one needs to do is open Apple Contacts and open a new document in Numbers. Then in Contacts, if you haven't already done so, create a list from your Contacts. In our case, it was 50th Anniversary. Once the list has been created, click on one name in the list and then select all of them, Command-A.

Then drag and drop the selected contacts onto a new blank numbers document. A small icon of a contact card should appear as you drag. All of your contacts will automatically show up in numbers with each field, a separate column, and each record in its own row. Of course, you can delete any of these columns you don't want and save it as

a numbers, Excel, or text file. Now, as an added bonus, this is a good way to inspect your contacts to see if you have any missing data, data in the wrong field, incorrect data, etc. It also lets you see every field that can be exported. I mention this because the last time I tried this about eight years ago, I created a field I thought would be very helpful. To my chagrin, that field would not export at all. You can see it, but it's just a prisoner of contacts.

Contacts finally just to be fair i did try to drag and drop into excel no can do.

So I don't know which one of them. One of those is preventing me from doing it because I was able to grab, you know, 10 and move them over and grab 10 more and move them over. And, and I gave up trying to find which one of the ones wouldn't let me go, but there's something in there that wouldn't let me take them all, but I could take a vast majority of them in big chunks.

So if you try this and it's not working, that's the reason I mentioned it, if you're trying it and it's not working for you, try doing five or ten at a time and you know if you only have 40 or 50 to go it won't take you that long to drag them that way and then you'll quickly find out which one is preventing the export okay.

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This seems the safe route, but it is probably leaving cruft behind, a cruft that takes up storage space and could possibly cause problems if it's still being loaded by the system or accessed by some harmful programming. What do you do when you've updated a program and are asked if you want to get rid of the rest of it bill

i should say updater is sitting here thinking well clean my mac may jump in here and delete some of this stuff it's going to remove what it thinks it needs to remove leave behind what it thinks it needs to leave behind and update your application if clean my mac sees something left behind and jumps in and wants to delete it i think you're setting yourself up for problems and i like it here's a really awkward analogy but it's like two people cleaning the house without talking to each other.

One person sets the trash down and set some things next to the trash can, intending to put them back later. And another person comes in and grabs it all and takes it out. And the good going out with the bad. And I think you're setting yourself up for problems if you allow CleanMyMac or Hazel or any of those programs to dump stuff out while an updater is working.

Which is not to say that when I do delete an app intending to put a different version or Like if I'm going from set app to the brand or from the brand's own to set app, then I'll delete it completely and let the other install work. So is my logic solid, guys? What do you think?

don't know if that's a good or bad thing to do i mean i guess it's there for a reason but i just again i don't like extra third-party stuff that's kind of running in the background like looking at stuff or looking at what i'm doing because i just i one i just find it kind of annoying to get the pop-ups and two i just don't feel like it's necessary for me because i'm happy to just run that stuff manually

an iphone 16 pro max that i got last year from the first day i've noticed sporadic bluetooth dropouts when listening or watching videos the sound will cut out for a few words and then come right back this happens with my two home pod minis airpod pros car radio and shocks headphones it happens with apple music spotify pocketcast eye catcher and apple podcasts my conclusion is that it is the device or it's software i've restarted the phone daily i've reset network connections unpaired and

repaired all the bluetooth devices no change i went to the genius bar and he connected his airpods and listened for a few minutes and said nope it's fine i explained that it's sporadic and is there a way he can test the bluetooth radio he then took my phone to the back 20 minutes later he came back and said can't find anything his advice was to restart the phone more often as it had been 20 full hours since my last restart close any unused apps and as a last resort i have 180 apps on the

phone so there could be a conflict and i should delete my phone and only install apps as i need them i felt like i might not have had the best genius he says because of these suggestions uh to force close the apps yeah that's bad um i took my phone and left i'm not sure about his last suggestion the apps worked fine with my iphone 15 pro any thoughts this is when i wish there was a safe mode on an iPhone to start up in. Oh, yeah.

There is, you know, there's gotta be, we just don't have access to it, but, uh, there's gotta be anyway, Adam, what do you think?

I assume when he's saying he reset things that he's been doing the reset network settings. So going into settings, general, transfer, reset iPhone, reset, and then reset network settings.

Um if that's what you've been doing and the only other thing i can think of is maybe trying resetting all settings um obviously that's going to require you to reset up a bunch of things so that's going to be frustrating but it's better than doing a complete wipe and reinstall um so i would try that first if the just reset network settings isn't working generally that would work that would be my first bit of advice is like try reset network

settings and you are going to have to reset up your network stuff and things like that. Beyond that, you know, I think unfortunately it's a backup, the iPhone erase and restore from backup. And then if that fails, backup, erase and restore from scratch. I mean, that's like the nuclear option. And that would be my option of absolute last resort. I mean, if you do all that, I feel like at that point you can take it and it's still broken.

You could take it back to the Apple store and be like the Bluetooth radio is thorked. I know it is.

If it does, then I would nuke and pave. I would wipe it again and let it restore from iCloud and let that be the test because otherwise, I don't know. That's just me. I realize I am certainly inserting an extra step unless, of course, we prove that the Bluetooth radio is shot and then and then we're replacing it. But it just, you know, I like to get rid of all the variables is kind of my my path. So I like that. That's the only change I would make, because you're right.

If you if the radio is dead, even if you can prove it to yourself, otherwise you will have to wipe your phone to complete scratch to prove it to the Genius Bar or Apple support. But, you know, so, yeah, so I don't know. Either one is fine. It's personal preference, but I would I want to know that that radio is good or bad before I start adding variables to it.

Decision in that i don't it it's not a bad thing to try but my gut says that reset all settings is not going to fix this problem uh it fixes other problems i don't i would i i would be pleasantly surprised if it fixed this one but you know i don't and i don't know what that means

you know, there's probably some ability to do that, but better. I go mute now and, and, uh, yeah, let the show go back to its normal high quality.

after a short 37 years my lovely young wife of 48 years has decided it was time for us to right size our home. Thus, we are moving from a two-story to a one-story, and I'm trying to not get caught. If moving is not enough trauma, she's also considering changing ISPs. We live in the greater Houston area, and she thinks AT&T fiber will be more reliable than Xfinity Comcast cable in a hurricane or ice storm. Who knows?

I did enjoy Dave's story today about how robust his fiber was when laying on the ground. LOL. Thus, the questions. What happens to my email when a service provider has changed? I have had an at Comcast.net email address for longer than I can remember. And while I have not saved every email, those that I have saved, I do not want to lose. I know phone numbers are portable, but I've never heard anything about email addresses.

I'm hoping the brain trust can shed some light on a very confusing subject many thanks in advance and keep up your invaluable work

IMAP and POP, if you're still using POP, access to your Comcast email will continue to work. But that does not count as usage, according to Comcast's support article about this. And we'll put a link in the show notes to that. What does count? Are two very important things. The first is that you have to have logged into the Comcast web email portal at connect.xfinity.com in the 90 days prior to canceling your internet service.

So my advice for this to meet this criteria would be to log in a week before you plan to cancel and then again the day before you plan to cancel belt, suspenders, and everything else that you can think of to make sure that whatever their logic is that counts as you logging in has happened. And then their second criteria is that once you've made that transition successfully, you need to continue to log into that same email portal at least once every nine months.

So, again, belt and suspenders, my advice would be to set a calendar, recurring calendar reminder that happens every three months. It's going to take you 10 seconds to log in. And this way, even if you miss two reminders in a row, you still have a good chance of not losing access to that email account. I don't know if they will alert you via email that you're going to lose access to your account.

Like google does that every 180 days if you have a google apps for domains or workspace or whatever it's called if you haven't logged into it even if you've been getting mail through it or whatever if you haven't logged into the admin interface they send you that thing and they're like we're going to shut you down i don't know if you get that email from comcast or any alert at all so don't assume that you will just do the uh do the you know quarterly log into the web interface and

you know should be off to the races so yeah they'll let you do it which is kind of amazing You know, we get to say nice things about Comcast, go Comcast. So I don't know.

So let's be clear about that. Or use your iCloud address. Again, you don't own iCloud.com. Or go get a domain and attach it to your iCloud email and just use that as your email going forward so that you are completely portable. You don't need to, your, your contact information, your identity isn't tied to your ISP.

And so when we started mac observer and it was like all right this is a domain that i own great i moved all of my you know i had a i had my you know dave at mac observer account for all the business stuff and then i had another account for my personal stuff i'm like this is great this i'll never i set my wife how'd that work out for you i set my wife and kids up decades worth of email i i had started to divest

myself from that a little bit more certainly more so than my family So yeah, when we sold TMO, I had to put in a contract that we had two years to keep this specific list of email addresses. And they have been very generous. And though it's been far more than two years, none of those addresses have gone away, even though contractually no one is obligated to do that anymore. So I'm still appreciative of it. Yeah.

So it duplicated my AU sound processor and then it got louder. So I hit it again. So I had three AU sound processors in a row and audio hijack pro sending all that out to you over and over and over again.

this happen and then someday that knowledge now is in your brain right and now it gets to be collectively in all of our brains and there'll be a day when it's like well wait actually i want that i want a layer two compressors on top of each other so and and then you will so it's

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So back in episode 1086 We talked about enabling local network access for apps Right. You know, when a warning on your Mac or an alert on your Mac comes up and it says such and such would like to find and connect to devices on your local network. And I talked about how I needed to do that for or I was doing that so that they could talk to printers and and all of that. Bruce wrote in and said local device access might not limit everything.

He says, I have no problems navigating to devices on my local network in Chrome, and I have very explicitly said no every time it has asked for that local network access, and I double-checked that it was disabled in system settings. So, Dave, your assertion that this is required for a browser to access the web page interface of a router or something else on your local network is not consistent with the data that I have.

He says, I have exactly one application where I've allowed this local access, and that's Dropbox. That local access appears to be required for the LAN peer-to-peer file sync to work. I think the challenge lies in glossing over the first part of the sentence in the dialog box and on the settings page. This will allow you to use an iPhone or iPad on your network. Oh, it says... He sent us the thing for Keynote. So Keynote would like to find and connect to local devices.

This will allow you to use an iPhone or iPad on your network as a remote control in Keynote. And then the sentence in question, allow the applications below to find and communicate with devices on your local network. The dialogue isn't asking allow this application to communicate with. It's asking allow this application to find and communicate with. And that makes sense with the Dropbox example, he says.

Dropbox wants to actively discover other Dropbox instances on my local network, which Bill's reading, he says, indicates is done with a UDP broadcast packet on port 17500. However, find isn't required for a browser to connect to device on the local network because you're telling it the IP address. It just needs to connect.

So this makes this is interesting. And I have done some testing with this and confirmed what bills what sorry what Bruce is saying that that you can disable or say no to that disallow that and still absolutely get to those things as long as you know the address. Why things that are looking for printers might need this, I don't know, because the system takes care of the searching for printers, but certainly with web browsers.

I did the other day also have Zoom come up and ask me for local network access, but only when Lisa joined a Zoom that was already going on, and Lisa was on my local network.

So zoom somehow knew not somehow i mean it knew that we were both coming from the same place and said hey wait i don't need to send their communication through the cloud i can have the two of them so zoom is doing some extra magic to to peer-to-peer things together but it would have worked with or without it it it just you know was going to be more efficient with it but um yeah so thank you for that bruce good stuff nice yep you got uh you got a question adam

i think we've talked about uh i was very quickly running out of my icloud search i have the apple one plus premier whatever uh account for like all the apple stuff um so you know plus everything and then it comes with uh two terabytes of iCloud storage. And I have one daughter who just loves to take videos and all kinds of stuff. And she was slowly like eating up the majority of the family's two terabytes of storage. I think she had like 1.4 and the rest of us had the six left over.

And so I was watching my iCloud storage get to 1.8, 1.9.

And then we were trying to do some podcast stuff. I was trying to send her some files and um like the files weren't syncing and i'm like i bet we're getting like right to that point where like you know it's not able to sync stuff because we're like barely have enough storage left and you know we're doing different audio files and different versions of them they get pretty large so i'm like i gotta bite the bullet and just get the six because

the next jump for me we've talked about this is the only thing apple's offering me is the six terabytes which is for 30 bucks a month. And I've just been like, it hurts me even as I say it now.

Because what happens now, if I go into settings, into my Apple account, I go into iCloud, I can manage features. So I manage my plan. I see iCloud Plus features. And for storage, manage plan is six terabytes.

When I choose manage individual services, it says, guess what? I have Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade. I have iCloud Plus with two terabytes of storage.

So I'm paying a total of, you know, $48, essentially, you know, $47 and like 94 cents or whatever it is. But, um, but I see two subscriptions there and, uh, and, and are you seeing only one on that page, Adam?

And I don't know that I know how to get them merged without messing up a bunch of stuff.

Right. And then there you should see, hopefully see the things that I see, because the options that I get for storage plans are more plentiful than what you get. Because I can add iCloud Plus with 50 gigs, 200 gigs, 2 terabytes, and then, of course, the 6 terabytes is $30. But the 2 terabytes is, as I said, $999. 200 gigs is $299. And 50 gigs is $0.99. So I am adding the same plans that you are adding. But when I add them,

you'll see I'm sharing a screenshot in our Discord. But it says you're currently using 2.4 terabytes of storage. All plans can be shared with up to five family members. And so my guess is that that's your path is to go and add storage to I would add storage to the family plan first and then take your extra block of storage away. It is you are buying, as we've seen with Apple in the past anyway.

So that's the only way I can go on this. you are buying storage allocations you are not buying the the actual storage that's being used so if you were to take it away i don't think your data just like magically goes poof you know they

Because that was my first real concern was like, oh it just unsubscribed me from apple one and now i'm gonna lose all my my plus media access and stuff right that did not happen yeah

And when you go to that settings, there is an option that says choose individual services. You can unsubscribe from Apple One and keep only what you want. So you can go in and piecemeal. I don't think you get as much of a discount, but you can go in. I could go into my Apple One Premiere and just turn off that iCloud Plus 2 terabytes if I want.

I can literally uncheck that just subscribe from that two terabytes so that's not what i want to do i want to um adjust it but you can you know piecemeal your services i don't know if that means you lose any kind of discounting or you just get less discounting but it seems like you can kind of pick and choose i

That that's the rub there is is they don't have a pick three you know it's not like a barbecue joint right it's you know get the two meat plate or the three meat plate but you get to pick which your meats are that's it's not apple one is not barbecue so uh you know that's how it goes yep uh we have more questions and we have cool stuff found so we have a decision to make uh but first what i want to do is tell you about our next sponsor because all right well let me tell you i I use our sponsor,

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So earlier this episode, I asked a question and a Dogster answered in our Discord chat. And what I asked was, how do I transfer and sync? Well, really what I asked is, how do I sync my dock between multiple Macs? And while there's not a great answer for that, Dogster does have a great answer for transferring a dock layout from one Mac to another. So you get it set the way you want and then move it. So that's step one is set it up the way you want.

Step two, copy the com.apple.doc.plist file from your preferences to the same location on your other Mac or other Macs. And then after copying, you run killalldoc. The only capital letter there would be D. All of this is in the show notes already. Killalldoc in the terminal to force the doc to reload its config. And then you've got that doc on your Mac.

So Dogster, thank you for that. excellent excellent excellent love it uh so that's that's a quick question answered thank you yeah it's awesome uh adam you want to take us to craig's question

Full-on max amp draw on the circuitry. Basically the same thing happens when you initially plug in a UPS into the power outlet and turn it on. This is continuously causing the 15-amp circuit for that room to trip because all three UPSs move back to house power as soon as it's restored.

The solution needed is a unicorn. I'm looking for a device that would sit between the outlet and the UPS, and when it detects the presence of input voltage, it will delay some period of time before actually turning on the other side, giving power back to a UPS. My plan is to use such a device on my UPS that is non-critical, so power goes off, UPSs all go to battery, power comes back on, Two of the three UPSs immediately go back to power draw.

One of them, however, delays for some number of minutes before restoring power to the non-critical UPS AC input. Basically, I'm looking for the opposite of a timer that shuts off power to a timer that turns on power.

Either hire or consult an electrician if you're comfortable working with electricity, at least consult an electrician unless you're uh throw all caution to the wind like me then uh go bare feet wet your basement floor and stick a screwdriver in that uh in that box because that's no in all seriousness you gotta when you turn off that main breaker realize there's still hot power at the very top and know that uh you there are some solutions here um one is uh and and this is highly unlikely

if your wiring is good enough you could up the up the amperage in the breaker but you must know uh that you've got the the wiring that'll handle the 20 amp and likely you don't or they wouldn't put a 15 amp breaker in there in the first place your problem comes from this the inrush this is from the eton ups fundamentals handbook inrush current the maximum instantaneous input current drawn by an electrical device when first

turned on some electrical devices i.e ups draws several times their normal full load of current when initially energized. So that's why you need the solution. And I think your solution may be in these delay timer time relays. They're available on Amazon for about $13 or $14 a piece. I think you need two of them. That way, if you have three UPSs, one will come on immediately. You set 45-second delay on one timer. That'll bring your second one on

after 45 seconds and then set a 90-second delay. That's just an example. You could set it for two minutes or four minutes or whatever you need, but I think 45 to 90 seconds will probably do enough for the UPS to come on, draw its big load, and then settle down, and that way you aren't over-amping that whole circuit.

In my answer to Greg, I gave him the whole power formula and assumptions and that sort of thing, but three, 800 watt thousand volt amp ups will draw normally normal draw is going to be right at 20 amps so i'm assuming he doesn't have that or that blow the circuit anyway uh but but when they come on they're going to draw several times their amperage so you can get one of those delay timer time, relays put that on there it will it that will solve your problem it will come

back on but you need to know how to work with electricity uh so back to my initial advice either consult an electrician or hire an electrician i think for the price of a ups you could probably have all that installed and be up and running and good to go.

Let me see if there is... I was looking to see if there were other things that that that would just plug into an AC outlet that would do this. We'll put it here in the show notes. But yeah, yeah. These things can exist. Yeah.

So we just need to find one of those. And I know it exists.

But, I mean, it's a real need because that UPS, it's going to draw heavy at first.

and I know Adam needs to head out, but I would love to have you here for at least the beginning of this question. Listener Dave alerted us to, well, an article and then another article and a series of them reporting some not necessarily good information about Backblaze's financial health. Oh. Yeah. And so it was it was it started out as a paper from a company called Morpheus Research. And they point out many things with Backplace being a publicly traded company.

They, you know, there's a lot of things that is therefore public things that are therefore public about their their their finances and including. And so they report, I don't know, a dozen things on this article, maybe more, maybe 20 things, 30 things, something like that, about how executives of the company were selling stock before bad news was announced and things like that and all these things that if you read this on the surface, it's not great.

And, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. Maybe there is some truth to all of this. However, as I started digging into this, what I also learned, Was that Morpheus Research was founded in 2025, so it is a relatively new company, and holds short positions against Backblaze that they purchased before this research note came out. So it muddies any ability for us to at least efficiently know whether or not to trust the report.

But again, you know, I'm sure that there are things reported here that are factually true. They are painted in a light that certainly would benefit someone with a short position in Backblaze. And and, you know, so do we to go back to the meta question? Do we need to worry about Backblaze? I don't know is the answer, but we'll I'll link to I will link to a chat GPT session that I had within which the link to this Morpheus report and then also some information about Morpheus is there.

I don't just want to link directly to the Morpheus report in the event that someone didn't hear this discussion and and doesn't understand the context of of things. So I, I will, I will link the show notes to that chat GPT session and, uh, and you can, you can see what it said. And obviously it's always good to, um, to dig in and, and, you know, make your decisions, but yep. So, I mean,

Leadership's inability to manage the company going forward and I'm not saying that I'm saying if it were that and that you know if that's true well it's a 250 million dollar company like someone is going to come in and believe correctly or not believe that they are smarter than current leadership and that they can take the helm and turn this thing into either a profitable 250 million dollar company or a billion dollar company right and and so they will acquire the assets

and they want to keep the business going if it's a 250 million dollar company there's lots of customers like us paying into them and they want to retain that income and all of those things so yeah it's not going to go away it's just that's that's how that would work but yeah it it is worth being aware and that's why i wanted to bring it up in the show but i i don't know enough to know What's going on so but yeah i promised uh that i would talk about sonology in this episode and adam

if you need to duck out we're gonna let you duck out i will i will share this information with you separately my friend uh all right thanks everybody yep see you next week see you next week right uh and

i will share this information about sonology by way of a cool stuff found because I dug into this with Synology and what I'm talking about this is what came up in the last episode where Synology's 2025 units and only, well, 2025 and presumably later, but nothing earlier, only their new 2025 units are brand locked currently to Synology drives, Synology branded drives.

Now that's not entirely correct, They are locked to a list of drives that are approved for use in Synology disk stations and vendors can apply for approval. So it's not always only going to be Synology drives. But as of today, or at least as of two days ago when I had this conversation with our friends at Synology, there were no third party drives yet approved. And so I pointed out an example to them. I said, okay, my current SHR volume has 20.

It has several 20 terabyte drives in it. If I look at Synology's plus drives, the largest one is 16 terabytes. So what happens if I move this SHR store and you can, whatever you migrate to a 2025 unit is grandfathered in. You're totally fine. You don't have to have, so you could, I could take my drives and move them into a 2025 Synology unit and they would work fine. But when I go to add a new one, it has to be on the approved list.

And I don't believe I could be wrong, but on quick searching, the Synology plus drives or whatever, the largest one that I could buy from them is a 16 terabyte drive, which means I cannot add storage to my array because my largest drive is a 20 terabyte drive. And you have to add drives that are at least equal to that size. And so I asked them, I said, asking for a friend, asking for a Dave, asking for our listeners.

And they don't have an answer to this question yet. They're working on it for us. However, listener Rob does have an answer to this question. Yeah, he does. Yeah, he does. He found on GitHub is a thing called Synology HDDDB, which is a way of replacing your Synology's drive database with something that is far less restrictive. And in fact, one that you can edit and put your own drives in and all of these things.

And you need to set it up to run at startup so that when you update your Synology operating system, it's going to put the list back out there and you're going to replace the list. It's this game of cat and mouse. And so it's out there. There are instructions. They're very clear as to how to do all of this. And this issue, I run into this. Like when I put my first 20 terabyte drive in my Synology, it told me this drive's not on the approved list.

Now, the 18 terabyte version of that same drive, the Seagate Exos in this case, was on the approved list, but the 20 terabyte wasn't because it was relatively new. It hadn't been put on the list. Now, there are two different flavors of Synology approved list. There is the one that goes backwards for 2024 and before, and then there's the one 2025 and later that's far more restrictive.

But there always has been this list and this GitHub thing or this thing that's on GitHub, this Synology HDDDB is was really built for the existing the 2024 and prior units so that you didn't get these errors when you put your drives in. And it's like, no, it's going to be fine. Yeah. And so they but they do have a 2025 plus model specific piece of information about this.

And then so there's there's all kinds of there's there's information about how this is going to work with the 2025 models and instructions on how to do it. And all of these things is a huge page all about this stuff. So there are answers there. But I also

And so we don't want to have like we want to know it's all in our wheelhouse because as you've pointed out synology support that you know they'll support a disk station that's like eight years old 10 years old sometimes older amazing yeah and so they they want to be able to continue to do that and this is probably a way of of limiting those variables but They also know that there's the enterprise customers that are going to be happy

and probably doing a good thing by buying Synology branded drives and having all the support in one bucket so that everything is guaranteed to work or at least built to work together. And when there's a problem, you've got one stop, you know, one place to call and there's those enterprise customers and that's great.

And then there's the prosumers that are doing this on a much tighter budget and therefore wanting to kind of do their own thing and are willing – I would be absolutely willing to check a box saying, yes, I understand this drive is unsupported. I have put it in anyway, and there it shall stay. I got this. Exactly. Right. You know, so I think now the people that I know at Synology are in the marketing department. They are not in, you know, it's not like, yeah, they're not the engineers.

Actually, I know some engineers there, but and I know the CEO, but I haven't been talking to the CEO. So like the people that I've been talking to about this are not in any position to make decisions and might not even be in a position to heavily influence decisions. I don't know. But I do know that when I ask these questions, they aren't I'm not getting a you're holding it wrong answer. I'm getting a you know, that's a really good, valid question is is the response

I'm getting, which tells me that a and I know this. We're not the only ones asking these questions. Obviously, there's articles out there about this left and right. But that there's discussion happening about maybe we stepped too far. That's my that's my interpretation. They have not said that to me. But that's the feeling that I get is in in in the way that responses are coming back, the way conversations are being had. It feels like this is something where they're taking input to heart.

Shows us that this is obviously a software it confirms that this is a software limitation and therefore is one that could easily be altered evolved by sonology as time marches forward very easily It doesn't mean that they will evolve this going forward, mind you, but it means that it is, it, it would be nearly, not nearly, it would be trivial for them to choose to add or, or change the, the restrictions that this list imposes.

like us. So they definitely care about this market and have for a very long time. I'm so I'm I'm I'm I'm optimistic that that that there will be a first party solution, but I'm thankful that there is a third party solution.

And I have an SHR volume in it, Synology Hybrid RAID, which lets you have multi disks of multiple sizes. The 1621XS+, if you set it up out of the box, does not allow Synology Hybrid RAID.

You cannot set up a volume with shr on that unit on the same unit that i am currently running an shr volume and the reason is only software that unit in synology's mind is for enterprise Corporate stuff and they they have chosen not to allow shr and you got to do traditional raid And traditional RAID is more robust, let's say, than SHR, although I've never had major issues with SHR. But, you know, traditional RAID is more robust. And so that unit is for that.

So they just turned off the SHR switch when you are creating a new volume on it. However, I migrated those disks or maybe not the disks, but the volume was migrated from my previous unit into it. And it happily runs SHR. No problem. I've added disks to it. It's fine.

It's running shr as shr there's no issue it's totally fine so it there are these and it's similar to the grandfathering of a you know a array that you migrate over to a 2025 unit it'll it'll let you use your existing disk so i feel like there's going to be some there's some middle ground i that's my hope so anyway i realize we have we have gone extra long

today on the day that we were supposed to go short yeah yeah yeah yeah uh and if i had not promised to talk about synology then i would have skipped this or i wouldn't have skipped it i would have tabled it till next week but we promised yeah and it's it's kind of important uh i know a lot of you out there were worried about this so thank you for uh for listening today yeah thanks Thanks to Eero for doing that giveaway with us. MacGear.com slash giveaway.

Go sign up. It's a good one. I'm loving my Eero Outdoor 7. It's working out great. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Even though Adam had to leave the show a few minutes early today, make sure to go listen to his debut film podcast. That way you can get more of Adam that you missed for the last 10 minutes here.

Make sure to listen to Pete's other show so there I was for aviation enthusiasts some fantastic stories and my other two shows Gig Gab for working musicians and Business Brain for entrepreneurs thanks for hanging out we're having a blast make sure to review the show matgeekab.com slash review