Ben Owen

We've all heard the stereotypes about programmers having poor social and communication skills, but building high quality software solutions is a team effort and is as much about communication as technical skill and expertise.

I recently attended a BCS workshop on the Registered IT Technician (RITTech) standard. I was inspired to apply and received my professional registration 5 days later!

Nobody likes ads. They tend to be intrusive, irritating and inconvenient. Not only that, but they are usually delivered alongside tracking cookies and analytics code, which despite all the data sent back to the mothership, usually fails to deliver adverts that are truly meaningful or relevant.

My previous two posts (part 1, part 2) have covered setting up a local NAS and an offsite backup server. This post will discuss how to back up data from the NAS onto the remote server.

In my previous post, Part 1 - NAS setup and local backup, I discussed how I set up my new Unraid NAS and configured my Windows PC to back up to the NAS. However, while this protected my data against hard drive failure, both sets of data were stored inside my house - I had no protection against disasters such as fire, lightning, etc. In this post, I will outline the steps I took to set up a remote server ready to recieve the backup data from my NAS. In the next post, Part 3 - Back up NAS to offsite server, I will cover the actual backup process between the two servers.

Back in 2017, I wrote about how I almost lost all my data. Luckily I was able to recover my drive with the aid of a soldering iron and a few forum posts, but this was a shot across the bows and I started looking for a better backup solution.

Series of blog posts covering how I built my home backup solution.

The new Meadow F7 microcontrollers are a really exciting development in the embedded .NET ecosystem.

This is a follow up to my original post, Improving FreeImage.Standard performance with Span.

The success of the Let's Encrypt means that it has never been easier or cheaper to secure your website (or web app) with HTTPS. This post is a guide on how to use Let's Encrypt to secure your IIS-hosted website.

There have been a lot of really impressive performance improvements in .NET over the past couple of years:

The three most important attributes of a software engineer were identified by Larry Wall (author of Programming Perl) as "laziness, impatience, and hubris". I would suggest that a fourth great virtue would be "curiosity".

My web server hosts a number of small sites - personal, family and friends. Today, I was setting up a secondary DNS name server - something I've been meaning to do for a while - on my new storage box (which I provisioned following my recent no-backup experience!), when I noticed that several domains that I was migrating did not actually resolve to my server anymore.

Disclaimer: I wrote this blog post to document my experiences. It is possible to damage your HDD beyond recovery if you don't know what you're doing. This is not a how-to guide. If in doubt, take it to a professional.

Confession time.

I decided to have yet another attempt at adding a blog to my website.