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The perils of having Too Much Data

Picture of bush and backgroundMy Sister-in-Law is now up to almost 200 gigabytes of raw and processed photos and has suddenly realised that most of it is not backed up. And one of her data drives (yes, all IDE busses on her workstation are full) is starting to throw SMART errors. And she had the fear of God thrown into her by the sudden demise of one of my drives on Monday.

So... quick trip to the wholesaler, one 250GB WD drive, one USB2 cage, and do the copy... and the cage drops the ball about every 8GB. <sigh>.

So, out with the DVD drive and in with the WD. Copying, copying... 74% now after five hours of rsyncing. Would I like a multi-CPU multi-PCI-buss one-IDE-controller-per-drive to do this kind of thing in half an hour or so, neatly and with a RAID? Yes, but they cost money, which some people don’t have. The hard drive and cage cost about as much as a copy of XP Pro – and which would you rather have in hand?

In less than 2 hours, I’ll finally have a chance to upgrade (new GIMP, amongst other things) her machine while she sleeps, so she can get up at Silly O’clock and work some more (no rest for the wicked and all). If anyone’s busier than me in our extended family, it’s her.

In between doing other work on my laptop (hurrah for laptops!), I also got to play with a nice camera and take some shots suitable for slide backgrounds. The Canon 20D focuses pretty much instantly, and lights up a little square or squares on the display to tell you where it found focus. SIL has a nice selection of lenses to play with; one of them can focus on a person on the other side of the yard, and defocus the person standing right next to them. The only fly in the ointment is that the firmware in this one doesn’t like gphoto2, so the 10D gets used as an image downloader.

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