2 hours to copy four gigs

oops!! Make that three hours!! I finally broke down and yesterday purchased a 500gig external hard drive. Gosh ~ I remember when 500megs cost almost a thousand dollars alone!!!! In trying to manage my image files, I have run out of room everywhere! On my desktop's 160gig HD, I don't have too many corners still available... I had purchased a 350gig external HD in Spain before departing in 2006 and that is now filled, though I have frantically been trying to burn off the files during the last few weeks and months - with little success as each week I shoot more, adding to my backlog and worklist.

Last night it took four hours to format the new HD, then after a reboot it took another three hours to partition it to make organizing the files better and easier. As I type this, I am moving the files slowly over to the 500giger from the 350gig HD, and to move 4gigs it's taking an average of three hours.... grrrr

Luckily, while last weekend attending the opening exhibit at my friend's gallery collectively Grasp when she introduced me to a musical website where you can hear your style of music, all the while remembering your likes and dislikes, then searches for more music that fit your musical likes so you only hear the type of music you enjoy, and those similar. I love it.... The other day I listened to about five hours of flamenco guitar music which I really love, and makes me miss Spain even more. Right now I'm listening to Dido-type music while moving these massive files and am enjoying with immense pleasure the tunes of these different artists with a similar style, many whom I've never known by name but by their music.

Once I get everything moved to the new external HD, I'll format the other external and partition that also, something I've been trying to do but not really, since I have over 280gigs of images on there and I didn't want to risk losing them in the case something happen during the partitioning process....

Suuuuure, all this should keep me again in front of the monitor for about a month at the very least!!!

In the meanwhile, my eyes and vision continue to slowly improve as they heal... I've driven a few times at night now and am happy I can see better in dim light where I am not uncomfortable driving blindly into the darkness as it was that situation previously. I often like to look around ~ for example while stopped at a red light ~ and see distant billboards, buildings etc, to test my vision and how I couldn't see something clearly last week, and now can. I can clearly see 18'x24' billboards a block away well, and other lettering farther as well. "Seeing" is to define the act of seeing sharp focused edges, define the lettering, the message and sharp lines; and the ability to see low-contrast colors as opposed to brighter colors.

Hey!!! Only two and a half hours remaining on the copying to the new HD!!!!

Just a picture captured while around the city as Halloween nears; snapped with my Motorola RZR cell phone camera...

They never told me this about MY files on CDs

Modern technology is great ~ I always say ~ when it works! Sometimes we think something might be the greatest thing on the planet since sliced butter, when in reality, it's a nightmare.

The best thing about the always-changing computer technology is that everything is always backward-compatible. This means that if you for example, have a floppy diskette with your data on it, it'll work in 2008 as well as when you originally copied the files onto that diskette back in 1997.... that is, if you can still find a computer with a floppy drive.

Right now I have a box full of CDs. It's a big box. The CDs within were shipped to me from Spain. Amazingly the plastic jewel cases arrived without any scratches and not one broken... as compared to a few other boxes when I arrived in Eugene over a year ago, that contained the same precious contents ~ my image files and music ~ and many of the CDs were broken! Jewel boxes, CDs..... all mixed within a box and the sharp plastic edges sratching the CD surface it's supposedly protecting. Try recovering your irreplaceable images recorded onto a CD that has deep scratches, or broken into many pieces!! NOT easy.....

So, here I am with a box of more than 60+ CDs. I'm going through the whole box and burning them all eventually onto my external hard drive I brought with me from Spain. Months ago in Eugene, when I had the first broken CDs, I decided to start using the external hard drive for my images exclusively. Why?

Reasons:
External hard drives are much faster than a CD or DVD drive. The bottleneck is less with an external HD, allowing the huge image files to be read and displayed much faster. NO matter how fast your CPU is or how much/many fast RAM you have, if you use a CD/DVD drive, it's going to be slow.

One also must consider the security of a HD. It's more durable than thin plastic. It has a smaller footprint as a single CD jewel case, but imagine putting up a shelf of 50 CDs (I have) and compare that with an external HD that has 300+ gigs capability and holding so many gigs of images, the footprint is actually much smaller than you can imagine.

Organization is good, if you follow the following rules:
a. Put all new files into a folder classified by subject matter and date. When I am finished with a calendar year of new image files, I move all those files created within that period into a main folder marked with that year, then everything within separated into its own folder titled by its individual category: flora, events, landscapes, sunsets, etc. Furthermore, I separate those into folders by date. You get the picture. Easy to organize, easy to find, easy to store. The better you create your filing system, the easier it will be to find those files weeks, month and years later.

The earliest CDs in discussion were burned in the early 2000s; still the number of errors in attempting to read just the folder is amazing! Can you imagine trying to read just one folder ~ not to mention the contents, I'm talking about just opening the stupid folder ~ encountering errors, and after 30 mins just ejecting the CD, waiting a few minutes and just trying it all over again? To date with this CD in my DVD drive burned in 2002, I am TRYing to copy less than 130 image files. After four hours of uncontinuous attempts, so many read errors, so many ejecting the CD, etc... I am still not finished!!!

So, be forewarned!! And yes, I have a very fast CPU, almost 2 gigs of RAM, and a PC that is about to go flying out the window!!! And there's more than 60 other CDs waiting for the same treatment!!!

Also remember: each year cameras are coming out with better resolution than the last digital cameras. That means each individual image file will be bigger than last year's little files, and with that in mind, can make for a bigger nightmare!!

UPDATE: WoW!! I just discovered that if I copy one image file at a time, I don't get the read/write errors!!! grrrrrr Actually, still a lot of errors but.....