Friday, March 28, 2008

Your Saturday morning reading.

I'm guessing most of you will not read this until Saturday. And again - I'm trying to build a weekend following. While most of the blogs are dead. I might have something interesting to read. Hey! Might. Don't get all excited yet.

The last couple of days have been a blur. So I will try to give you the rundown.

Today (Friday) I had to take Jane Doe into the vet. Not because there was something wrong, but because they won't give me any more medication for her eye. She hasn't been in for a year. Which is really good. Considering. But, this always makes me completely stressed out. While her eye has been stable for a really long time - the day will come when they tell me all my efforts aren't working anymore. And they'll need to take the eye. The choice has always been a struggle. Take the eye or medicate. But, her comfort level doesn't seem to have changed. Nor has the pressure in her eye. So for now - she keeps it.

Yesterday (Thursday) we found granite slabs for the crapshack at what I think is a really reasonable price.

Also yesterday my machine started to act up. So I'm using Mr S.'s machine for a stop gap. Which brings on a whole frustration about how backups are still such a complicated task. I'm not sure doing backups are something that most people care about until their drive fails. And by then it is too late. I however constantly think about backups. I loose a lot of drives. I'll admit, I'm really hard on them.

These days, all your pictures reside on your disk drive, and not film.

The problem is - most backup solutions suck. They do the backing up fine - but when you need to get that data, you realise how fucked up the program really is.

So, a big debate has been stirred in my house again. What to do about backups. Shadow drives? Backup software? And don't say CD backup. Drives are much too big now to do that. It once took me over 24 hours constantly swapping disks to back up my system. And I think that was before I started taking raw photos. Needless to say, I'm pretty frustrated. Plus - I always manage to have a drive problem right when I'm most overloaded. Which is now. Yippe!

3 comments:

  1. I have been I-Drive (www.idrive.com) for a year with good results. I had problems back in May but it was fixed quickly. I think it is pretty stable now. First 2 gigs is free or else use the Pro version which is $50 per year. $50 per year is nothing compared to the headache of losing things.

    My usage was filling up for the 2 gigs and I reviewed what was backed up and deleted a lot of stuff that was no longer needed.

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  2. Thanks for the reminder to back up my photo files soon!

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  3. I don't have an "official-type system but here's what *I* do. We have several Linux boxes all networked (peer to peer). When I want to do a back up I have a place on one of the other hard drives set aside for this. I just save the data not the OS or any of the programs.

    I have all the data & everthing else I want to keep in one directory so that when I back up I only have to back up one (very big) file (with lots of sub-directories) instead of having to remember where all the pieces are. I even keep things in there like favorite fonts I've collected over the years. The font file would get copied to wherever it needed to be to work but haivng a duplicate in the main file means I don't have to remember to go get that file to back up if I need to wipe the hard drive to reload the OS.

    True, it's not automatic as I do it, but if you run Linux (or are clever in Windows) you could leave everything booted up and write a scrpt and could do that on a regualar basis, like 3am every morining.

    Even if you back up manually, as techie as you are that wouldn't be a issue. Hope this gives you some more options. You could even get one of those large external drives and back up to that.

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