I first heard about the Drobo Storage Array from my friend Tony a few years ago. A Drobo Data Array is basically a self-contained RAID-5 data storage array in a box. For anyone that doesn't know what that means, it's basically a fault-tolerant form of storage where you can lose any one drive completely and still recover all of your data. Unlike most RAID-5 software or hardware systems though, the Drobo unit is intelligent in that it will work with different sized drives, and expand accordingly in the future if you pop a new drive in. My business partner picked up a Drobo about six months ago, ...

When I returned from Europe in April, I went down to my storage locker to grab a few items. Unfortunately, five months of boxes sitting on each other had taken its toll, and a few of them had shifted and fallen. Thankfully nothing was broken, but it was pretty clear that I needed to spend a bit of time rebuilding my locker at some point this summer. Yesterday I went to the locker and spent about two hours rebuilding everything. Based on the experience, here are a few pointers I would give to anyone putting their stuff away into a storage locker for an extended trip: Use high quality boxes. It's ...

I'm down to 12 days until I leave to Thailand, and it's definitely fast approaching. My friends Scott and Samantha leave tomorrow, so I'll get to starting watching their Facebook stream in the next few days to see my first glimpses of Thailand. I spent the last few days camping up at Cultus Lake, which is one of my favourite summer activities. It was pretty much perfect weather, other than being a tad cold at night, and was really enjoyable and relaxing. I have all my camping gear in my car right now, and am going to start getting it ready this afternoon to put back into storage for probably ...

I just got back from a four day whirlwind trip to the Toronto area. That means I have another 4,000 miles of flying under my belt this year, putting my grand total somewhere around 50,000 miles since January I believe. The trip back to Vancouver was pretty rickety with turbulence, but I was working on my laptop which helped distract me from the fact that I was hurtling through the atmosphere in a big pressurized pop can. Thailand is fast approaching, and I'm down to only 18 days to get ready. While I'm looking forward to seeing a new country and meeting up with some friends, I can't say that ...

When I left my apartment back in November of 2010, I put the majority of items into a 8x9x10 storage locker. I spent about a week selling off most of the big furniture (which would have been harder to store), and basically just ended up with a pile of boxes. I didn't hesitate at the time to put all my belongings into storage. I knew I would be gone at least four months, and likely more. But it's now July, which means my belongings have been in storage for seven months. At a price of roughly $100 per month for the storage locker, that means I'm up to $700 to store a bunch of boxes. At some point ...

For some reason, I initially thought I could simply turn my car off prior to leaving for my year long adventure and it would be completely fine when I returned. After talking to a few people though, it turns out that you really do need to take special precautions to make sure your car will actually be functioning if you leave it for any extended period of time. So if you're looking to leave for more than a month or so, you should make sure you take the following precautions with your vehicle. What To Do Prior To Leaving Over-inflate your tires by approximately 5 PSI. This will help prevent the ...

Today is November 4th, and my flight to Buenos Aires leaves on January 4th, 2011. That means there are only 60 days left to go until I depart on my big adventure. It wasn't that long ago I was doing a post in celebration of 150 days to go, and now here we are at the two month point. I'm heading to Mexico tomorrow via WestJet in Vancouver. I spent most of last night packing my suitcase and trying to get my apartment as clean as possible in case my landlord decides to show the apartment while I'm gone. In truth, there really isn't too much more to do in my apartment when I return. Other than the ...

I haven't blogged about my upcoming trip in a while, so I thought I'd do a quick update. I have one room officially boxed up, and the living room is mostly packed as well. The next big chore is to go through all my old clothes and get rid of anything I no longer wear. After that, I can box up what's left of the bedroom, and then start working on the kitchen. Truthfully, it probably wouldn't take me too much longer to get the rest all boxed up, but at this point if I go too much further it's not going to be very exciting living in my apartment anymore. I sold my TV a while ago to someone who was ...

In just 45 days, I'll be out of my apartment out in Chilliwack, and essentially homeless for the next 30 days. Truthfully, now that my place is partially boxed up, I'm getting antsy to hit the open road. My current plan is to have a lot of my stuff already in storage around November 1st, so I can possibly go visit a few people in the United States in November. As I mentioned before, I'm also heading to the Mayan Riviera in just three weeks, which will be a nice break from the norm. I haven't had a vacation in the sun since about the same time last year, so I'm definitely looking forward to chilling ...

I finally got around to finishing off a little project of mine at home. As everyone knows, I take a pile of photos. So many in fact that I have a hard time finding places to store them all. In the old days I would just make a DVD every few weeks and be done with it, but now that my digital camera is 10.2 MP, I can easily fill up a DVDs worth of photos in a few hours. Of course, I don't need to keep all of these, and routinely I don't. But for the ones I do want to keep it's getting hard to manage them all. About six months ago I picked up a 320 GB external drive to use for backups and started ...