Tong Family

Now why would you ever want to do this, well, in my case, I have a Thunderbolt doc so can get to the LAN at 1Gbps (and someday 2.5Gbps if I ever get the time to add a 2.5Gbps switch and upgrade my NAS to 2.5Gbps from the current 2x 1Gbps, all this is planned).

But things like Apple Watch unlocking need to have WiFi on, Apple has this concept of Network Order which tells it which network to use first. I found that when I was trying to get this all running, the traffic would default to the WiFi congestion.

The solution is something called network order, but with Ventura, this all moved around again. Turns out you have CTRL-click on the System Settings > Network on any of the networks to “Set Service Order”. The strange thing was by default the Thunderbolt was higher than WiFi, but I moved WiFi as low as I could and then it started working

Monitoring with Stats

Stats is freeware that you can brew install stats and it is really useful. You can click on it and change the Network Widget to show Megabits instead of megabytes since most networks quote traffic in bits. Also, you can set it to show the CPU utilization, the Fan speed, and the Hottest CPU. All of these are useful.

Drobo keeps going: APFS DAS

OK, so Drobo just went bankrupt, but I have to say they’ve done a good job on hardware. I have an original Drobo from 2008 and a DroboPro from 2009. This is 15-year-old hardware! But it still works. Yes it is just USB 2.0 (or Firewire which MacOS doesn’t even have drivers for anymore), so the most you can get out of it is 480Mbps, but for backups that doesn’t matter that much. I have 3GB Hard drives from the same era, so I get 24GB of storage (Yes, I know that is basically one disk now, but still, it is amortized hardware).

You can still download the Drobo Dashboard and it still works from the old Drobo site, but I would squirrel that software away. But most of the time you won’t need it, it is just to set up volumes. It uses old software so the maximum volume is 16TB which is dynamically shared against the 24TB drive. So I have two 16GB virtual volumes. Note that the Drobo utility only knows about HFS+, but you can use the MacOS Venture disk utility to format it as APFS which is pretty great.

Yes, the thing is super loud, but I only expect to do incremental backups every month, so after the initial load phase, it is going to be whisper quiet 🙂

It’s all working great: Synology Drive Client and BackBlaze Personal

And yes, now it’s all working great, I see that I can run in NordVPN mode with both the Synology Drive client automatically downloading from the Synology NAS to actually an old Drobo (sad to see them go bankrupt!) and then from there BackBlaze sees it and is not pushing up to the cloud!