 Welcome to Mackie Gab episode 928 for Monday, May 16th, 2022. And welcome to Mackie Gab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We mash them all together into an agenda so that we answer them and we share them and all of those things so that we can each learn at least five new things every time we get together. Today is going to be a special get together for a variety of reasons. The main one being today is focused. It's all about Synology. It's going to be a Synology Distation Geek Gab. And we've got all kinds of stuff for you to talk about. And then there will probably be some follow-up video how-to's, some shorter form things that we'll post to our YouTube channel that don't make sense to do in an audio form. But the goal is for each of us to learn five new things about Synology Distations. And if you're not a distation owner, that's okay. We're going to explain why you might want to become one. And then we'll help you kind of get in there. And if you are already a Synology Distation Owner, well, we've got some stuff for you too. Sponsors for this episode include a new relic.com slash MGG. That's where you're going to go to get 100 gigs of data free forever. No credit card required. And also lumenskin.com slash MGG, where you can go to get your free trial of lumens products. We'll talk more in-depth about each of those things shortly here later in the episode. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun, and... And here in Boulder, Colorado, I'm Jeff Gamet. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, I think the first four of us on the show is Pilot Pete. Thanks for having me back, John. Yeah. Yeah. Gamet, thank you. I know you were just here. You made a hasty return to the show. It was during the episode that we had you on recently where we talked about that we were going to be doing this Synology GeekGab. And you seemed like a perfect person to have joined us for this. So we are happy that you were able to make it back so quickly. Well, I'm happy you invited me back. And I feel special because two guest spots on MakgeekGab in a relatively short period of time, and we get to talk about Synology and, of course, we will all have things to say. And I can't wait to learn my five things. Yeah, same, same. And Pilot Pete, I'm glad you were here today. We didn't expect to be able to have you and through all sorts of magic and other things that are not magic. You're a series of unfortunate events. Here I am. Here you are. I wish that weren't as true as it were, but things are things are on the up and up for just good. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just briefly state that I had a medical emergency earlier in this week that is going to prevent me from working for a few weeks. And so here I am. Yeah. I plan to sit back and do more production than involvement, but I'll jump in where it's absolutely essential that I impart my wisdom to the world. Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it. All right, John. So let's start by just telling and we'll go around the horn here. Telling everyone how we use our disc stations and and and we'll get into the how to use them in this way later in the episode or maybe that'll be some of those video, you know, short form segments afterwards if it makes more sense to do them that way. But just to wet your appetites and show you the things that can be done with them. Let's let's let's go around the horn a little bit here and share our use cases, the things that our disc stations allow us to do. So, John, you want to you want to you want to start us off with a with a fuel that that you're using? Sure. So one area that is interesting, but you can enhance is doing time machine backups. So I have two machines. I have two synologies. And I do, you know, one machine and one and one to the other. Here's the other thing I do, though, which I think is pretty clever is I also use their backup program to copy the contents of one as to the other. And I am in the space to do that. Well, OK, and that's called hyperbackup. I have some back and the other nice thing is hyperbackup can do versioned. Versioned, you know, you could go back in time. Right, like time machine using. Yes, using theirs. I've had that come in handy when my time machine backup got corrupted. You could restore an early version of it. Yeah, and I had a better idea to just recreate it. Yeah, well, you may not be wrong. And you can convert that to using snapshots to make it even more. You don't even have to use hyperbackup to solve that problem. If you if you let your time machine backup be snapshotable on your sonology, then you can just roll back to a snapshot and you don't even have to back it up somewhere else. It's it all it does it all amongst itself. Yeah, Mr. Jeff Gammett, what are some of your favorite use cases for your sonology? Mr. Dave Hamilton, my favorite use case for my sonology is is my nightly backup, OK, which is exactly why I bought the sonology I have. I wanted to have something dedicated for daily backups. I have a very well rounded backup strategy that includes multiple applications and multiple and multiple target points. I do not like the idea of losing any data. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And is there is there another thing that you use your sonology currently for? Or is that like it's is it a fixed purpose, sole purpose device, at least at the moment? It it is a fixed sole purpose device. I did go ahead and set it up for remote access because what if I'm on the road and I need a file that I know is backed up there, but is not something that I have on another cloud server? Well, sure. Now that just becomes part of from a practical standpoint, part of my cloud access system to all the data I have in all the places. That makes sense. OK, cool. All right. I like it. I like it. I like it. And Pete, how are you? What is one of your favorite use cases for your sonology? Well, I've got three basic cases that I use. OK. Number one is file sharing. It allows me to collaborate on projects, like doing our taxes, that sort of thing. We put all the receipts into a folder and we can fill out that we even have a PDF that we fill out together. Debbie does some of it. I do some of it. We get get the taxes done, that sort of thing. And so this is file sharing on your local network. Yeah, on the local network. Yes, just mountain as a server. Yes. OK. And but it's it's a rich man's drop box, I guess, but a poor man's in the sense that you don't have to continue pain in for, you know, the sonology. You pay up front where it's drop box, it's a subscription. So you have OK, so I just want to make I want to make sure we're clear on this. This is not just on your local network. You're using Synology Drive is what it sounds like to. Yes, I am that which is a client, which is a client program that I have on my laptop that allows me to go anywhere in the world. But yes, and but as well, it's it's things like if my daughter needed help with her homework, she she saved her homework to a folder on the Synology Drive and I could go in and I could prove for you something that she had done, those sorts of things. So collaboration in that in that manner. Every month, I have to fill out an expense report. If we go and stay somewhere and we have a receipt that we need to submit, then I've got a choice. I can put that receipt in my suitcase and hope it doesn't fall out or get destroyed or lost before the end of the month and take a picture and submit it when I do my expense report. Or I can take a picture of it right there at the hotel counter. On my phone, I actually use this app called Genius Scan, which converts documents right to a PDF. Then I use the Synology Drive app on my phone and upload it immediately to my Synology Synology Drive in the basement. And so I never lose receipts. But my favorite is when my Mac Mini decided to stop playing, I converted my Synology to my Plex server. OK, all right. Yeah. So those are my three main uses. I use it for a whole bunch of other things. I'm sure I could go on forever. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah. And and you're using Genius Scan. However, the files app on your iPhone now syncs with Drive or any of the other engines that are available. You can have it. You can have it see into your Synology Drive. You can have it see into Dropbox. And yeah, and the files app will scan pictures to PDFs as well. So yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. OK, there's my first one. Yeah, ding, right? There you go. Yeah. John, do you have any others that you like to use that you want to share with the listeners here? Yeah, I'd say the second thing that I use it for is to share videos or other media. OK, and what I'm using is a video station, its Synology's platform. And then to stream music, I have something installed called Media Server. And and Plex, of course, and Plex. Yeah, yeah, Video Station is is like Synology's own take on the video portion of of Plex. And it works quite well, I will say. You know, I've I've standardized on Plex on on mine, but I I also run Video Station. The nice part is you can point both Plex and Video Station at exactly the same library of files. So they are available in both. And there have been times when traveling not so much recently because Plex is pretty stable these days. But there were times years ago where I would be traveling and have some issue with Plex or another and be like, you know what, I'll just use Video Station. And the nice part about Synology is there are not just web access clients for all of these things, but there are like Synology built iPhone, iOS, iPad, OS, Mac OS clients for all of these things. You know, Synology Drive was mentioned where you get your own. I call it private dropbox, right? I don't I don't assign a financial value to it because you're right. The the the initial expense of a Synology, which we'll get into in a little bit here, is is high. But there's no monthly fees to keep it going. And you get to and you get to manage your own cloud. So, yeah, I've I've been using Synology Drive here for a very long time. It I have a dropbox account, but I don't think any of my Macs to dropbox. What I do is I think I use something called cloud sync on again on my Synology that sinks to my dropbox. In fact, it sinks to two dropbox accounts. It sinks to my Google Drive and it sinks to my box dot com or whatever is it box dot net box dot com puts them all into a folder. And that folder, I then sync to my Macs with Synology Drive. So that saves me from having to run 16 different syncing engines on each of my Macs. And it also saves me from dropboxes three client limit because I really only have one client. And here's the good news. Synology Drive doesn't even or cloud sync doesn't even count as a client. So I get so you've even saved yourself a client spot. Yep, exactly. It's it really it works out. It's very good. I've also been using Synology Photos, which is like your own iCloud photo library right on on Synology. Now, I have mine read from my iCloud my local store, my iCloud library. But I could just have it sync directly from my phone. You run the Synology Photos app. It sinks from your phone to your distation and you get all of the facial recognition of people. You get the object recognition so I can search for cats or butterflies or cars or whatever. And it finds them. It does all sorts of auto sorting. And it's if I didn't already have iCloud photo library integrated into my life because of my Apple One subscription. I could easily move to just using Synology Photos and probably be happier because you can do all the family sharing and those things that we complain that iCloud photos doesn't let us do. So Dave, can I can I please back a little bit? Sure. So the video station thing. I mean, I've been intrigued with with video station. And and of course, I'm not using it because I've made the conscious decision that the Synology is backup only. Sure. Do you know if there is an Apple TV app? Yes. Yeah. There's a video station app for for Apple TV, for sure. OK, cool. And and I think there is a Synology Photos app for Apple TV as well. But don't quote me on that, even though I I literally just said it on a podcast that will be immortalized. So I could be wrong about this. But yeah, they make Apple TV apps. They are very focused on on on on the Apple ecosystem, which I've I've loved since day one. That's one thing I've loved about them, too. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of other things I do on my distation. The one Synology app that I want to mention before we kind of move on is Synology Office. If you've ever used Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google, whatever they call the presentation thing that's like sort of like PowerPoint, but not Google Slides. Thank you. Synology Office is exactly that, but you host it. And it's a collaborative web based document editing thing you can do. You know, like word processing documents, spreadsheets. I have one of the companies that that we run here. It solely uses that. We don't use Google Docs. We don't use Word or Excel or your numbers or pages or any of that. We all just collaborate on the web in Synology Office and it's on the distation that's running in my house here. So we don't have to worry about privacy or any of those other things. We own 100 percent of it and it works. It's stellar. It's really it's really quite something. So, yeah, fun stuff. And then there's a bunch of things I do inside of Docker. So that's the other fun part of this. And that's where I get to look. Canon, I just hopped on my Synology interface and it looks like there's over 75. Yeah. Packages that you can install to make this run. So, oh, yeah, I need to be done to scratch the surface. No, we haven't. It's true. It's true. We're we're barely there. That's right. So anything else that anyone wants to mention that we haven't mentioned yet? VPN. Excuse me. Go ahead, John. Yeah. Well, you can set up a VPN server and that's how I get into my network remotely. Great. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that that is something Synology has done since day one. At least our day one with them is, yep, you can set up your own VPN. And and if you're if you're router, if your router supports VPN, I would say absolutely use that way simpler. But if it doesn't, your distation's got you covered. You just forward a couple of ports and you're good to go. So the thing that I'll mention then is that we've got we haven't mentioned yet. We're talking about distations here. Synology has two and I understand a third one coming. They've got some really prosumer amazing routers. They get to what those things do or we'll be talking about the new router soon. But yeah, I figured I figured we'd focus on largely on the distations for this episode, because otherwise we'd like to be on that whole show avoid Dave. Hey, Dave, in the Discord chat, the upstairs saying don't forget about surveillance station. Ah, yes. If you want to, if you have a bunch of cameras around your property or other or otherwise, you can sync them up to Synology Surveillance Station, which becomes your own management viewing platform for all of those cameras or some of those cameras. You can have it record from those cameras or not record from those cameras. You can have it record when they sense motion or sound or humans, if the cameras are capable of that. So, yeah, it's a pretty cool. It's a pretty cool thing. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, the chat is well, it's in Discord now at MacKicab.com. And we would it the best part about one and great part. I want to say the best. There's lots of great things about Discord. But one of the greatest is that the chat doesn't end when the live stream ends. Now, the chat just goes all week long. And it's a wonderful thing to have a home for the MacKicab family. And you folks are kind of running it yourselves. And I am we are all just guests there. Is everyone everyone's pretty equal, which I like. We can all ask questions. We can all answer questions. It's great. So. All right. Well, we've got a bunch of your questions related to Synology that we will be going through shortly here. The next thing that I would love to do is tell you about our two sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Sounds good. All right, come on, folks, you know it's 9 p.m. You're finally unwinding from work and your phone buzzes with that alert. Something's broken immediately. Our minds start racing with what it could be. We're, you know, maybe it's the Apache servers down. Maybe it's the database servers down. Maybe there's a bug in the code that no one's hit before. And you start trying to solve the problem before you've even figured out how to sit down and look at it. Now, you and the whole team, you're scrambling from tool to tool, messaging person after person to find the issue so that you can then go fix the issue. That won't happen if you go with our sponsor, New Relic. New Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you'd normally buy separately so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. More importantly, you can pinpoint issues down to the line of code. I know it's amazing. It sounds like magic. I think it is, but it works this way. You know exactly why the problem happened and you can resolve it quickly. That's why the Dev and Ops teams at DoorDash, GitHub, Epic Games and more than 14,000 other companies use New Relic to debug and improve their software. So whether you run a cloud native startup or a Fortune 500 company, it takes just five minutes to set up New Relic in your environment. And that next 9 p.m. call is just waiting to happen. So get New Relic now before it does. And you can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigs of data free forever. No credit card required. Sign up at New Relic dot com slash M G G. That's any W R L I C dot com slash M G G New Relic dot com slash M G G. And our thanks to New Relic for sponsoring this episode. All right, guys, let's chat skincare. If your skincare routine is basically you washing your face in the shower with that one shower gel that we've been using since high school, it's time to level up because as it turns out that regular body wash that we've been using that we thought was good enough is probably damaging our skin. But thanks to our sponsor Lumen, we can drop that bottle of three in one and start using products that actually take care of our skin. I've been using Lumen and they have great quality products. All their products aim to help with the stubborn acne scars, the under eye dark circles, wrinkles, sun damage, dry skin, oily skin and more starting with Lumen is easy. All you have to do is take their two minute quiz at Lumen skin dot com slash M G G. And they'll tell you exactly which routine is best for you based upon your skin care needs. All of Lumen's products come with instructions, so it's extremely easy and will help protect your skin from potential damage or future acne. Plus, all their products are made using only natural ingredients that actually work like licorice root extract, rose flower oil, charcoal powder, ginger, green tea and charcoal. Skin care shouldn't be that complicated thing we dread doing. And thanks to Lumen, it's simple. It takes less than 90 seconds out of my day. There's two things that I've liked from them, their charcoal cleanser and exfoliating rub I've been using on my face. It really makes a difference. You got to check this out. Like I said, it's super easy. Level up your skin care game with Lumen skin today. Go to Lumen skin dot com slash M G G to get your free trial of Lumen's products. That's L U M I N skin dot com slash M G G to get your free trial of Lumen's products. Lumen skin dot com slash M G G and our thanks to Lumen for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's get into some of your questions. And really the thing, the place that I think would be good to start is not which Synology, but what drive configuration is the right one for your Synology? Because I think answering that question is going to help us answer which or help inform us as to which disk station we want to get. Because once you know how many drives you want, then you know how many bays to buy. Listener James kicks us off here and says, I just preordered two five bay Synology disk station 1520 pluses, and I ordered 12 eight terabyte drives. One NAS will be used for video storage and archiving. The other NAS will be for network backups of a handful of Macs on the network and maybe surveillance station. If I can figure out an automated way to get that footage from one of my cameras. When I went on to Synology's raid calculator page, I was overwhelmed by the different raid options. Could you help me focus on the couple that might make the most sense for my use cases? Are there other options I should take into account when getting all of this set up? Yeah, so the 1520 plus is one of the many Synology units that supports what's called SHR, Synology Hybrid Raid. You're going to want to make sure that you understand what this is and whether or not you want it. It provides some flexibility that that you may like down the road. Specifically, Synology Hybrid Raid lets you use drives of different sizes at the same time and maximizing the capacity of your Synology volume based on those those drives. So my feeling, the way I run things, I won't run a Synology that I can't use SHR on because I it's really great to be able to slowly upgrade my drive sizes and start taking advantage of the new sizes before I have drives of all one size. Again, it's it's easy to start with drives of all one size. And it's probably the way many of us will start. But that's the other beauty of SHR. You don't have to if you've got drives of different sizes, put them in and it will maximize them, which is which is a great thing. So is everyone here using SHR, John? Are you using SHR on yours? Yes. Great, Jeff. Now, Jeff, you've got a two bay unit. I know I'm jumping ahead a little, but have you configured it as SHR? I did. And and and I did that even though I was getting two drives of the same size and and actually rabbit hole for a second. Sure, I bought the same drives, but I didn't buy them at the same time on purpose because I didn't want them coming from the same batch. That's super smart. And we've talked about this on the show when when we've talked about it because I've done this when I get drives from the same batch, they fail at the same time when they're in use for the same amount of time. It's amazing. But literally within weeks of each other, they will start failing. So they. Yeah, that was smart, Jeff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good advice. I have to confess, I don't know if I'm using SHR or not. I think I may be because of that brief discussion we had in the pre show about I bought a drive and it was incompatible, I think, because it was too small. So if someone does buy the drives of different sizes and to start, then they want to put their smaller drives in first, correct? Well, if you if you're just starting out, you can put them all in at once and it will figure it out. It's it, but there is a limitation based on the way the Synology Hybrid raid works, that when you go to add a drive to an existing volume, it needs to be at least as big as the largest drive in the volume. It can be bigger, but it has to be at least as big as the as the drive in there. So, yeah. So, Jeff, you were smart. Even if you wind up going with a two bay unit, you were smart, I think, to set up SHR, because one great part about Synology is if you, for example, decide to upgrade to the 1520 plus that James talks about here, you can take your two drives out of there, put them in the 1520 plus and all of your settings, your volume, your data, everything is now running on the new Synology, except you have three extra drive bays because five bay unit. So that that's why I recommend one of the reasons I recommend SHR for sure. And I really I well, case in point, I have a Synology 1621XS plus sitting downstairs. I tested it and now it sits in the box. Why? It doesn't support SHR. It's got a killer processor in it. It's really built for it's like that crossover unit between prosumer and enterprise. And some of the enterprise units are built to just do raid and not SHR at all. And that's this one. But I'd love to have that CPU running, but I don't know that I want to inherit a non-SHR capable unit. And it's a software limitation, obviously, if the processors there, it could do it. So, Dave, could you go back to that what you said just before that, though? So because he set up SHR, he can switch from a two bay put, throw those drives into a four or five bay, eight bay unit. And it's going to it's not going to format those drives. It's going to take them and spread them across. Correct. Now, that would also work, even if he used regular raid. It just means that when you take those two drives and put them in the upgraded unit or the larger unit, you then still have to use drives of the same size. You're limited by your initial decision if you didn't choose SHR. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And depending on what drives you're using, that may not be a big deal. But if you have the option of the flexibility that goes along with SHR, why not take advantage of it? Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. What size drives are we each using in our in our disk stations? Does any I'll start because I can get there quickly. Unless you happen to know, Jeff, which you probably do. You know, I think I put eight kick drives in mind. I need to go look just to be sure. Because, you know, because you pop them in and then you're just done. Get right in the interface, right? I mean, I can look in the interface and see if you launch storage manager on your disk station, you can look in the HDD SSD section and and and you'll see that that's where you'll see your drives are. And so I can tell by looking at mine that I have one 18 terabyte drive that is my hot spare, so it's not in use. I have a 16 and then that that is in use along with three 14. So I've got three 14s and a 16. It does mean because I don't have a drive, another 16 terabyte drive, it does mean that there are two terabytes that are unable to be used because they can't be. Um, the way the Synology works, you have the it's set up that you have fault tolerance of one drive. So one of my drives can fail. I don't lose any data. It doesn't even go down. I just take the drive out. I replace it with one or it replaces it with the hot spare, which is a beautiful thing to just have that at the ready. And and then it and then it, you know, goes into into the volume. But because of that fault tolerance, I'm not using the extra two terabytes on my 16 yet. But when my next 14 terabyte drive dies and it pulls the 18 in, we'll start using the benefits of the 16. And then I'll have two terabytes on the 18 that are waiting to be matched by whatever I put in there next. And that's sort of how I encourage myself to keep the size of my volume growing over time. And that that has worked out fairly well for for me. That's a nice incentive. It's a good. Yeah. It's just a nice way to make it work. So and I was right. It turns out that I did pop two eights into mine. Cool. Cool. Yeah, there you go. So here's the other beautiful thing. You can just type once you log into your interface. I have to do is type the type the word storage. And because I have storage manager, click on that. It is so it brings you to where you want to go. You don't have to hunt back forever in the GUI. It turns out I have three three terabyte drives. I've got an open bay. Guess what I'm going to be buying. So there you go. The same. There you go. I found a thing. I've seen when looking for drives that some drives are listed as four K native. And I always thought that's super weird. Like all the drives that I have are more than fast enough to push out video at twenty five megabits per second or whatever. Like, I mean, four K is is nothing. What why, you know, what the bandwidth required for it to just play video? Why? Why is this a big deal? Well, it turns out that the four K they're talking about when we talk about four K native hard drives is not four K video at all. It is the size of the sector on on a hard drive. So traditionally, sectors on hard drives have been five twelve byte, which would be half a K. Let's let's think of it that way. Right. And the problem is that over time, with larger and larger drives, that five twelve byte sector has become a bit of a liability in terms of efficiency. And to solve that problem for using four K sectors was developed as the replacement. The problem is that your controllers like they need to be able to work with both and they really can't. So these four K native hard drives emulate a five twelve byte hard drive, but they are ready for the future when you have all four K drives and you can just switch your partitioning and the structure to support a volume of only four K drives. So that's what four K native means. I I think I think most of the drives that I've been buying are not four K native yet, but my guess is over time that will that will change. Had you encountered some of this too, Jeff, you were you were nodding along. Yeah, yeah, because I did the same thing you did and went to figure out why do I need drives that support a specific video resolution? And that doesn't make sense. A bit is a bit and yeah. And so I found out that, yeah, but it's about the sectors. And so then I immediately thought, oh, no, I better check my drives because I must have really screwed up if I didn't make sure they're four K native. No, they're not. And and it's OK. It's totally OK. Yep. Yep. I don't like I said, I don't think any of the drives that I run are four K native yet in that it's OK. It's going to be all right. Yep. Yeah. Eventually, it won't be. But yeah, for the first time in the future. Yeah, yeah, we will have changed up all those drives anyhow. You got it. All right. Let's talk about selecting a NAS and listener. Terry sort of writes the wrote the perfect question without knowing that he was going to set us up. He says, what are your current recommendations for a two bay NAS? And he says, I would just like to do something that gets me started in the technology world. So I figured I would have each of us and Pete, since we weren't expecting you for the show, I didn't ask you to prep this. And that's fine. So we will do it as the three of us. To prep what the two K with the best two bay drive is. See, you got me talking K's now. What the best two bay drive or Synology would be two bay unit. And then also, what would the we'll call it the either wishful thinking or the perfect world unit be for that each of us would recommend? Not necessarily. It may be the one that we're currently using, but it would be the one that we would recommend to you if you asked us this question today. So, Jeff, you want to you want to start with that one? Then John will go to you. Sure. All right. So for the two bay side, I'm picking exactly what I have because why would I not have bought the very thing that I think is right? And that's the the two twenty J. And the reason I picked that is because if you're someone that is looking to get into Synology and you don't want to spend a fortune and you want a device that has really good performance and and is going to let you do all the things, this is a really great place to get in to the to the Synology world. And in my case, you know, I bought it, popped in my drives, set it up so that I played with some stuff and then just wiped everything and started over so that I could set it up as my backup. And and it works great. It's, you know, it is a solid machine at a reasonable price that will let you do all the things. So if you're looking to just get in, here's here's a good way to do that. And yes, there are others that will give you overall better performance. But honestly, I think for most people, they would never know the difference. Do you know if you can run Plex on the two twenty J? Oh, totally. Yeah. OK. Because that that's the Plex. There was a period of time, at least, where Plex was something that was not just universally runnable on your on your distation. So OK, that's great. That's great. And I assume it runs really well. I'm not doing that. Sure. But yeah, I mean, if I wanted to, sure, I could spin up Plex and and and do it. Well, I'll say that with regards to Plex and the stations, the only difficulty I've had is if I leave some of my files in their MKV format. If I convert them to MP4, I don't seem to have any problem streaming. Interesting. But but MKV I have problems going to the one television up upstairs. The one in the living room seems to work fine. And so I don't know where the conversion issue is. I suspect it's in the television because it's well on the on the main floor, but not the third floor and I don't know. It's a mix of both with with Plex. The if it's possible, it will that the distation will just send its raw contents out without having to transcode anything to whatever device you're playing it on, your TV, your your phone, your iPad, whatever. If the device doesn't support the format that it is in natively on your disk station or on your Plex server of any kind, then then the Plex server has to do its level best to transcode on the fly to get all of that there. And that can be that that's where I'm sure that's where your issue is. I think it's that TV then upstairs because sometimes even setting the playback settings down to three twenty K. It still doesn't want to play. And I'm like, all right, I'll just change it over to MP4. And it's well, it's probably that your Plex doesn't have the horsepower to transcode the MKV videos on the fly at whatever size you have them. But but the other thing is you could go in to Plex and tell it to pre-transcode your videos if you know a destination that you have, you can say, yeah, I will want you to pre-create a version that will work over there and then you get the best of both worlds. So. Oh, interesting. OK, because what I've just been using handbrake and converting it to MP4. Yeah, not worrying about that works, too. Jeff, we tangentialized off of you. It what would your larger than two bay if if if money were not so that two twenty J is one hundred and eighty seven bucks to just to set the plan to bear. That's bear without drives. Yeah, we're going to talk about prices without drives. Thank you. So what would your your next level up be? If if if you were if you were to take that step or if someone were to ask about that step, that would be the 1520 plus. Yeah. And and the reason I would go with this one, the there's multiple reasons, of course, but sure this one. I mean, you're starting off with five bays and it has plenty of horsepower. So this would be the machine that becomes my version of Dave's Synology. This is the one where I would do everything else and and then leave the the two twenty J just as a dedicated backup device. Yep. So, you know, you've got all of your bays, but that plus that's the kicker for me, because that means I can plug in extra bay boxes. It doesn't. It doesn't know it. No, you can. That that is a truth about this unit. But the plus as far as Synology has explained to me, the plus just means it has a little extra. Oh, OK, so I misunderstood why they were including the plus. But we all does what I what I would want, which is give me the ability to add more bays. So if I hit the point where I've decided I've outgrown what I can do with the storage that I have, I'm not having to start over. I just add another box and keep going. Nice, nice. And that Amazon has it for seven sixty six seven hundred sixty six dollars bear discless at the moment. Q W E twelve thirty one in the chat says that it is sixty seven dollars cheaper. So six ninety nine, I would assume at B&H photo. So shop around, of course. But yeah, we shop around always. John, what was the secret? Go ahead, John. Yeah. Here's the secret as to what the numbers mean. Jeff, the number, the first number after the DS is the maximum number of bays. Not the number. So that means basically that you do expansion, which is one of the things some units allow and some don't. That's not entirely true. Oh, this can this do 15 bays? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it can be extended to more boxes on to this. OK. Oh, interesting. Got it. And so here's the one that I picked for like a high end one. Because John, you forgot to tell him what the second part means. And oh, let me play the straight guy. John, that was amazing information. Thank you so much. But what does the second set of numbers mean? I'm really curious. As far as I know, it's the year that that unit was created. Yeah, yes. Yeah. So what's your what's your pick for a two bay, John? It's close to what I have now. I have the 2018 version, but the DS 420 plus. OK. That's not a two bay unit. What's your pick for a two bay unit? DS 420 plus. Say it again. You're going to have to try one more time for a two bay unit. Oh, for two bay. What's your pick for a two bay unit? I know what it is. It was the DS 2 18 play because you put it on our agenda for us here. Yes. OK. And why did you pick the DS 2 18 play as the two bay unit? It's a two hundred thirty dollar unit. So a little bit more expensive than Jeff's two to two to 20 J to 20 J. Thank you. I would say, you know, that it looks like the processor is sufficient to do media. And they actually say, oh, make this a home multimedia center. So let's talk about this two 18 play because I chose it as well as my my two bay pick. Synology has a fantastic comparison chart, which I will put on the I'll put a link to the four units that we're going to discuss. So spoilers, the two I'm going to mention have already been mentioned, including your four 20 plus that I know you're going to talk about in a minute. But the two 18 play and the two 20 J have the same processor, the real tech RTD 12 96. The one difference between them is that the two 18 play has a one has one gigabyte of memory, whereas the two 20 J has five 12 megs. And that can make a difference, both in terms of the number of apps that you can run, but also in terms of file sharing speeds, I've found more RAM for just based on the way Synology is architected makes a huge difference in terms of file sharing speeds. So so that that that would be a thing that was. Yeah, that was the reason that I I went up to it in, you know, for for my pick, and it wasn't that much more. And it lets you do Synology hybrid rate and and all of those things. You know, if the two 20 J wasn't the the device that I wanted just for for the basic backups. And if I if I wanted to run a very robust file server, yeah, I'd go with something higher up the food chain. Yep. But, you know, even still, especially like if if you're on Wi-Fi for your computer, I don't think a lot of people would notice that performance difference. That's fair. That's fair. That was more about future proofing for me than, you know. But but yeah, yeah, either one of these, you're not going like in my opinion, you're not going to go wrong with either one of these. Yeah, for sure. All right, John. So tell us about the 420 plus the DS 420 plus, which was your your sort of your your pick for a step up. Yes. The reason I picked it is it's close to an older one that I have, but they upgraded some things on it. But the things I like about it. So four days are enough for me right now. I think I have four, eight terabyte drives in it. Let's see. Cash NVMe cash so you can do SSD cash, which helps speed up reads and or writes. And they actually have a little utility that shows you the number of cash hits, which can help determine whether you should do that or not. And it has two gig ethernet ports so you can bond them if you want to get maximum speed. Cool. Cool. Good stuff. You know, bonding the ports. That's actually something I think people should be paying more attention to now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the thing is some of their higher end machines, I think the fastest they have is 10 gigabit. Or no, I think they make something even faster than that. But a lot of their units have 10 gigabit ports. Oh, yeah, you can. Yeah, you can get them with them. I don't know if I guess some of them are would just come out of the out of the gate like that. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Do we need to talk about what port bonding is? No, I think we should we should save that for another time. It just it makes it lets you use two ethernet ports and go twice as fast if your network can support it. How's that, Jeff? That's absolutely perfect. We're out of the weeks. That my my picks will be quick because I also, like I said, went with the DS 2 18 play. And then the 15 20 plus is is the one like you, Jeff, that I would pick as sort of the step up for most folks. And it is it also you said it was your pick to match a, you know, what I do with my distation. It turns out that is exactly the distation that I use is the DS 15 20 plus these days. It's got a four core Celeron J 125 processor in there. It comes with eight gigs of RAM, which I really like the the one you picked on the four 20 plus comes with two gigs. You can upgrade it to six. And and I would highly recommend doing that if you're going to start doing the things that we're talking about doing with these poor Ram on these things. Put it get them up. Ram is is relatively cheap these days, even with supply chain stuff. It's just not terribly, terribly expensive. And so I had just highly recommend putting, maxing them out with RAM. And then and then you don't have to think about it after day one. But that's that's that's the that's like I said, that's the unit I use and it's fantastic. Just it does all the things I mentioned and there are some things I didn't mention. So we'll get to eventually. So yeah. All right. Listener David, go ahead, Pete. Sorry. OK, just so one quick question. And I will admit to possibly being distracted if and when you covered it. What is the so like I have the four fifteen play? Yeah, what is the play? The the plus is how many that you can add more base to it? No, the plus is not that you can add more base. The plus means that it has a beefier CPU. OK. And like the J. So play plus J. I don't know. J. I think it means jeepers. This is a really great device or something. There you go. Right. Yeah, I wouldn't like this is why I don't get lost in the model numbers because the rhyme and reason to it is less specific. Like you pointed out, John, the the the numbers in, you know, the the number of maximum bays and the year it came out. That's great. All the stuff at the end starts getting super wishy washy. And so that's why I recommend just go and use the Synology Configurator. They they also have a raid or I think it's a I don't know. There's a there's a feature on the site where you can say, OK, I know that I want five bays, and so I'll check that. And I want to be able to do this with it. And it starts narrowing things down for you. That's what you want to use. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes because that's the that's a really cool thing. Yeah, that's it. And then you're not worrying about selecting based on model number. You're selecting based on features that actually matter to you because they're the things you want to accomplish. The things you want to accomplish. Yeah, they despite their terrible naming convention, they actually have a good way of guiding you. You just have to ignore the terrible naming naming convention and roll with it. So, yeah. Listener David. As a question, it's often on people's minds. I finally took the plunge and purchased the DS 420 Plus. I also bought three Seagate 12 terabyte drives and configured them in Synology Hybrid Raid. The plan is to use this Synology to store photos and documents, host my video and audio collection collections using Plex and create a time machine portal for my MacBook Pro. My question is, first of all, do I need more memory? Yes. And secondly, what are the things that I should do now that I've got this? What are the first steps to take now that I've got this distation? And I would say that I mean, the first step is to do what you've done. Plug your drives in, plug the distation in, let it go through the setup process, get rolling. And then I would pick one thing per day and you may slow this down to one thing per week and start peeling back the layers of that app. So whatever your most important use cases and it might be backup, which sounds boring, but we all know, I would I would get that set up, go through it. You know, I've often said the Venn diagram between Synology or even just NAS owner and novice user doesn't have a lot of overlap. There is a connection there. And the connection is if you're in the novice user group and you buy a NAS, you will very quickly be in the not novice user group anymore. It's not that they're difficult to use. It's that there are a lot of layers to this and it gets really fun. And you're going to wind up diving in and getting involved in stuff. And you want to give yourself the time to get involved in the the nuances of each of these things that you set up. Because, you know, as we talked about at the beginning of the episode, you know, we all have a laundry list of things that we do with these things. That was not the case on day one. This is a process. I'm always adding new things to it. And the nice part is it's it's built to be a server. So once you get something up and running, you kind of forget about it in that you don't have to administer it anymore. You keep using the feature. But the administration of it, you know, you have this huge peak of time that you need right up front to get it rolling and then, you know, and then it tapers off over the next couple of days or a week as you tweak it. And like, oh, I didn't want it to work that way. I wanted to do this way. OK, well, fine, I'll do that. So I would I would start and I would do this in series, not in parallel, necessarily. I mean, eventually, you'll have it all in parallel. But but yeah, that's that that would be my advice to this is pick the most important thing and do it and then pick the next thing and do it. Oh, Jeff, what do you think? I think that's great advice and it saves you from getting overwhelmed, you know, you figure out the one thing. You get it smoothed out and working the way you want. And now you can move on to the next thing. But see, the thing is when you've finished working through that first thing, you might realize that there's something else that should be a higher priority now. So it's much easier to reorganize that priority list if you're only working on one thing at a time, as opposed to trying to jump between like five different configuration setups for all these different features. And by the time you think you're done, you're just frustrated. You're just frustrated. Yes. Yeah. And you don't actually really know what's going on because you never had the time to really focus on on each thing individually. The one piece of advice I would start with is don't start with Docker. That is going to be the first time you set up a Docker container. That's a whole different world. And what Docker does is it unlocks the capabilities of your disk station beyond that, which packages have been built for most of the stuff. We've in fact, all of the stuff we've talked about are packages that you install like apps on your iPhone. You go into package center on Synology, which is in the web interface. You click, you tell it to install it and boom, it's there. And there's a graphical interface to set it all up. Docker has gotten better. But what Docker is is just a let's treat it like another package manager. And it's a weird one. So just don't start there unless you already know Docker from, you know, from a past life or something. Then obviously, you know, you know what you're getting yourself into. But I would I would get familiar with the way your disk station works first before you learn this new language of Docker and YouTube videos are going to be your friend on on on that. So that's that's the only advice. John, you have anything to share on this before we move to Ari's question? No. OK. Ari asks, he says, I have a client with an old iMac running as a file server. They have 350 gigs of data, which we want to transfer to a new Synology disk station. I'm wondering about your advice on the most elegant tool to copy the data faithfully to the NAS across the network. Ideally, I would love for the tool to I would love for the tool to do its transfer through syncing rather than copying as the client may update a few files every now and then or even while it's still transferring. And it would be great to ensure the latest version makes it to the NAS. All right. So you could syncing means Synology Drive. We talked about that in the beginning of the episode. That's the the drop box that you use, right, that you manage. However, I don't think I would do that and want to head down that path for what it sounds like is going to be a one time thing. You're going to paint yourself into a corner doing that. And I just, yeah, I just don't think that's a good idea. Honestly, I would say, and I say honestly, as though I've been lying to you the whole time, candidly, I would use like something like Carbon Copy Cloner. I would mount the drive as a file share from your Synology over the network. Use Carbon Copy Cloner, just like you would with anything else. And the nice part about Carbon Copy Cloner is it remembers what it did and can easily find the deltas. And so I would run it and get the bulk of all the data over. And then right before you turn off that iMac as a file server, I'd run it again and copy everything over, maybe even turn off access to the iMac temporarily, copy everything over one more time, which is going to go much faster than the initial copy because it's it's it's it's only copying changed files and then shut the iMac down and you're good to go. That's the path I would take because you really don't want to put yourself into that into that corner. I don't know. Feel free to disagree with me, Jeff or John. I'm not going to disagree with you, but but I will enhance what you said. And it's funny because as you're running through everything you're saying, I'm like, yep, yep, yep. And you got the Carbon Copy Cloner. And I'm like, thank you for choosing the correct tool because that's exactly what I would have said to. So the the massaging that I would do for this is to say, OK, when you're ready to start that initial transfer, tell everyone to go take a break and and keep or do it overnight. Yeah, do it overnight. Keep everyone away from the from the whole system so that Carbon Copy Cloner can do its job and you get everything moved over. And and then, like you said, Dave, before you officially cut that iMac off the network, let it run one more time just so you can catch the the files where people were like, I'm just going to do this anyhow and and be done with it. Otherwise, you are now stuck in a permanent loop of the iMac and the Synology have to be running so that you don't lose anything. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. This is not going to be one of those. There's no simple way of doing this where there's no enforced downtime, but you can you can mitigate that and limit the amount of downtime with all the things we talked about here. John, anything more on that? Otherwise, I've got a question from Jeff that I will ask you. What am I missing here? I don't know. You'll have to tell us put it in the cloud. I don't know. He he's replacing his he has a file server on the network. Currently, it's an iMac. In the future, it will be a Synology distation. He just wants to get the data from the old file server, a.k.a. the iMac to the new file server, a.k.a. the distation. That's all. That's the that's the question. OK. Carbon copy cloner on the iMac is what Jeff and I were were suggesting. OK, so two things. One, why not just copy the data over the network using SMB or AFP or whatever? Well, you are. You're just letting carbon copy cloner do it using SMB. You would mount the drive as SMB. That's what we suggested. I see. And then let carbon copy cloner manage that so that you have the ability to copy any changed files in the future because carbon copy cloner does such a great job at managing that. You can also use carbon copy cloner's safety net on the copy to make sure if it does have to replace some files, it's not deleting them in the process, just in case there were changes made where there shouldn't have been. So OK. So plug the carbon copy cloner drive into the Synology. Nope. Run carbon copy cloner on the iMac because it's a it's a Mac based program and point carbon copy cloner at the folder on the iMac that currently has the data and then tell it to copy that to the SMB share over the network that is on the distation and then it'll take care of it. We did. We did have a comment, though, from from Dogster in the chat room at Mac.com slash Discord, where he says, why are you using carbon copy cloner instead of Kronosync? And Kronosync might be a better answer because Kronosync will accomplish what Ari asked. It will sync the files in real time, but it's using your Mac as the driver of that, not the disk station, which is where my head initially went. And so you can put that data anywhere you want. And then at some point, you just shut down the iMac and Kronosync stops. I like this. I like this. It's good. Yeah. Yep. This is why we do the show. That's why I love the chat room. Thank you. Thank you, Dogster. Very cool. All right. One last question before we, well, before we shared just a couple of cool stuff found and then and then get out of here. Listener Jeff says, I've got a DS918 plus that I'm getting getting better at utilizing and starting to have significant items stored here. Being a network drive, it is not backing up to my Backblaze account. I'm curious about which types of backup I should be using to protect this data from loss. I know there are solutions that involve AWS. Backblaze does have a solution. I believe Synology has their own cloud backup solution. I'm normally a path of least resistance type of guy and default to integrated solutions when I can. But I'm not sure what the best option of this is. John, you want to take the answer? Are you backing up your Synology? I know you're backing up your Synology. So tell people what you're doing. Yeah. So I'm I'm not doing it to the cloud, though. I understand. What I do is I use hyper backup and take the contents of one NAS and copy it to the other because I have enough space to do that. Now, in hyper backup, in terms of path of least resistance, I would agree that that's wherever you're going to back it up to. That's the place to start is hyper backup because it's built to do this. Yeah. No, I'm with you, man. Yep. Um, I'm not doing that, though. You're not using hyper backup. Well, yeah, I'm using hyper backup with my own drives with your party. You own your own cloud storage, right? Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. The if you don't own your own cloud storage, my advice, again, based on path of least resistance would be to go with Synology C2 storage, which Jeff alluded to there. I I do both. I do what John does because I have an extra NAS. And then there is a subset of my data that I back up to a one terabyte store that I purchased at Synology C2 again, just for, you know, just to have it not here, but like my, you know, whatever, 12 terabyte Plex library. I'm not paying for cloud storage for that, but I definitely don't want to lose it. So but what if we were, you know, Pete, you and I did this a long time ago with Crashplan and we certainly could do it now. Hyper backup using your solution, John, from one distation to another, does not require those two distations to be on the same local network. So, you know, you could take that other distation and put it at my house or at Pete's house. And now you have an offsite backup that you're not paying monthly or annual fees for unless Peter, I charge you monthly or annual. There's that, right? Here's that. Hey, there's income here. You're free. I'm very eager to do something like that. Because, yeah, we were doing that before with our Drobo boxes. And then Crashplan went to a money based in order to keep doing that or something. Yeah, it just it stopped being the right solution for us for that. Yeah, yeah. And then it stopped being a solution. And then sorry, Jeff, what was that? And then it stopped being a solution. And then it stopped being a solution. I do have an answer, though, that I'm going to bring us into our cool stuff found segment where there are only two things. I promise we're almost finished here, folks. Or at least we almost finished this before you jump into that. Yeah. A.W.S. was one of the options that was tossed out. I'm going to say don't don't with the A.W.S. Because for most people, it turns into a brain damage situation. And I would say that's a much better solution if you're at at like a much higher level in the business food chain. Got it. Yeah, pick some other solution. And there are lots. You know, you can back up using hyper backup. I think to Dropbox, you can back up to Google Drive. Like they're just run hyper backup and you will see all of the options. The ones we've mentioned and lots, lots more. So check them. They change not not all too frequently, but they do that list evolves. And I've found over the years, I've found some free solutions on there where it's like, oh, you get, you know, 10 gigs free. It's like, OK, OK, I'll pick 10 gigs of data and send it over there. Perfect. And you can do it securely and all that good stuff. You did mention back plays, though. And you're right. The back plays desktop client will not back up network stores, unless you use our first cool stuff found. Listener Keith sent this in a while back. He says, uh, many, many episodes ago, you mentioned AutoMounter. He says, I have a Synology NAS and based on your comments, I bought AutoMounter from the app store so that my iMac wouldn't keep losing my links to my mounted shares. And this is a problem with Mac OS. It doesn't like to restore these links. And we've talked about these solutions over the years. And AutoMounter, of course, was one of them. He says, I've been noticing for a few days, though, that my internet at home seemed relatively slow. And despite doing a few tests, I was unable to figure out why. Then during an update scan, Mac updater told me there was an update for back plays, this update can't be done via Mac updater. And I had to open the back plays client. Imagine my surprise to notice that it was four terabytes into a 16 terabyte update. He says, I have an iMac with one terabyte SSD and an external two terabyte drive. So I was a little surprised to see this in back plays. But it didn't take me long to realize that back plays was backing up the contents of my disk station. AutoMounter creates a link in home library containers, yada, yada to the shares it mounts, and back plays was simply following those links. And indeed, if you go to AutoMounter's website, it talks about using, you know, back plays to back up to your NAS or the other way around using your back plays to back up your NAS. And yeah, it's just one of the things that's there. And it's been AutoMounter, despite this. This is a two year old cool cool stuff found that we surfaced for this episode. But but AutoMounter's been continually updated ever since. So it's it's it's a it's a valid solution still. So, yeah. Hey, Dave, as long as we're here. Yeah. Do you mind if I derail us? Not exactly. Don't even ask. Let's go. OK, here we go. Here's my problem. And I'm throwing this out to the Mac Geek Gab Collective. Geek Challenge, we call these. This is a challenge. OK. So here's the problem that I have not been able to solve. And it does involve my Synology. So when my Synology is mounted on my Mac, Time Machine insists on trying to back it up. And when I when I add the Synology to the Ignored List and Time Machine, it will not stay like it immediately is just gone from the from that list. Does anyone know any way to force Time Machine to ignore that Synology mount? So the the weird part is that I couldn't get Time Machine to back up my distation shares if I tried. So send them over here, Dave, I've got your back. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So this is I'm I'm my question without going too far down the hole here is how are you mounting these shares? Are they just normal file sharing shares or are you using something like AutoMounter? No, they're just normal file sharing shares. Well, if anybody knows feedback at MacGeekGab.com, I don't have that answer. Yeah. And I do not have AutoMounter installed, although I had considered using it at one point. And then it was like, you know, I have enough problems trying to keep my my Time Machine desk from from basically exploding with with too much data coming over from the Synology. I need to fix one problem before I start automating other things. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. All right. Well, I don't have an answer for that. But maybe someone does and so we will we will we will forward those answers. We will share those answers in the show, but we will also forward them along to you, Jeff. If it happens to be an episode where you're not joining us. The last thing I've got on our list is a cool stuff found. I stumbled into this. There is a Synology app for it, and it is called virtual here. H-E-R-E virtual here. You run it on your Synology and then you run the client. So we'll say you run the server on your Synology and you run the client on your Mac or your Windows or Linux or Android device. And what it does is it finds USB devices connected to your server, so the Synology, and then connects them to your Mac as though you have plugged the USB device directly into your Mac. Yeah. So if you and this is especially helpful, you know, on your home network for laptop users. If you have some, you know, let's say you have a label printer. Right? That needs to be USB connected. And a printer might be a bad example in a lot of cases because the Synology can also, a feature we didn't mention, is it can take a USB attached printer and share it as a networkable printer, including AirPrint, which is cool. But, you know, if you've got some label printer or something that requires special software to talk directly to it to do its magic things and it can't be network shared in a traditional sense, virtual here. Is your friend. So I'm still looking for it. Like, I feel like I've got a use case for this just sitting there. And I just got to find it. So. And when you do find it, I'll let you know, please do. Because I mean, this is so cool. And now I just want to use it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Any thoughts on that, John, before we before we pull the ripcord on this here? No. All right. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, Jeff. Thanks for hanging out with us, Pete. This has been a blast. Thanks for hanging out with us, everyone. We really appreciate. Oh, we appreciate everything. It's fantastic. It's been so much fun. Thanks for coming, Jeff. I know you were just here. But if you want to, if you would please, in fact, briefly tell people where to find you again, I would. I would appreciate that. Well, sure. How about Twitter and Instagram? Jay Gammett, youtube.com slash Jay Gammett for some videos. And John, are you aware that Brian Chaffin and I have teamed up again and we're doing the context machine? I heard rumors. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of get around. I do a lot of shows. I'm easy to find. Yeah. Great. Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us. I knew when when we talked about this when we teased this out the first time, I knew that you were the right one to have joined us. And I believe we've proven that true. So and I'm so glad I got to be here for this. Yes, it's so much fun. Sweet. We will be doing some more in-depth, shorter form like how to's that that we'll be releasing in the future here. So keep a look out at our YouTube channel. You can just go to Mackie Kev.com slash YouTube. And that will bring you there. And yeah, we'll we'll see you next time, I suppose. It's how it's going to work. Thanks for checking out our sponsors. Mackie Kev.com slash sponsors will always show you all the latest. And then, of course, there's Lumen skin dot com slash MGG and New Relic dot com slash MGG mentioned in this episode. Join our discord channel. We're having a blast. John, we'd love to have you there. Mackie Kev.com slash discord. Speaking of which, Mr. Braun, do you have any? I know you got us into this mess, but you've been saving your voice this episode. Oh, I think John just left. No, he's back. My goodness, something almost happened. John, I bet that experience of having to leave and come back taught you something. Maybe you now have a lesson you could share with our listeners. I certainly do. And that is don't get caught. May the good advice we'll see you next time.