As if it wasn't annoying enough to have the home server crash last summer, the new one did it again a couple of days before Christmas, causing even more confusion that I'm just now getting straightened out.
The first crash last summer resulted from my original home server just gradually going bad. By the time we figured out what had happened it was irrecoverable. Fortunately I had gotten in the habit of backing its contents up to an external hard drive, but still, I lost a couple of months of photos (most of which I was able to reconstruct using deleted copies and copies from the home desktop and office laptop) and unfortunately an immense amount of work on the old ETSU Band audio files. The last save was after I had saved the individual audiocassette tapes of the 82-85 performances, so I don't need to rerecord those, but it was before I had separated all of the tapes out into the individual tracks. There are Internet-quality versions of those songs uploaded on Facebook, but the full-quality originals are gone - I have to go back and resave them. Also gone were all the slides from the '85 slide show that I'd had scanned. I still have the originals CDs of those of course, and they're backed up, so they are not lost, but they are gone from the server. Which is why I have not been able to make copies of the slide show I did for the ET band get together last summer in Dallas - I left the only copy of that show with Rick & Beth Garcia's. Not a big deal - I have gotten the entire 83 show slides scanned, plus a fair amount of 1984 as well. so I could do a better one now - if I ever had time.
The really annoying thing is that after the server was replaced with a brand new one in July or thereabouts, the bakup was not setup to run as it should have been, so when that server (plus a router and cable modem) went down thanks to a lightning storm surge through the cable line (all the electrical was surge protected, but I hadn't thought to protect the cable line) the server went down - again, irrecoverable - and the most recent backup was - you guessed it, the June 2009 that had been used to set it up originally. I was a little more careful this time, and I still had copies of almost all pictures from the fall of 2009 and all of 2010, but it was a bad moment there when I thought I'd lost all our pictures of the boys' first games at Cowboys Stadium. Losing the Paris and Greece/Turkey trips pics wasn't nearly as distressing (and we had backups of those).
So last week I spent several hours dumpster-diving in the recycle bin of the home and office computers getting the picture files that had been lost, and in the process discovered something useful. First, don't save photo files from the camera directly to the server - save them to the desktop computer, and then save from there, then delete the file on the desktop. Where I'd done that, I alwasy could get deleted copies. I also discovered that since I no longer trust the hard drive hooked up to my server to automatcially back it up, I manually back up changed files to a second external hard drive hooked up to the desktop at home. That way the data - say the folder with the Dad and Lad pics from yesterday and today, is on the server, and theoretically on the backup, but it is also in the deleted files on the home desktop and on the study external hard drive as well.
Of course that played hell with my iPod, which burst into tears when told that half the tracks on it the original files couldn't be located. Which actually made sense - half the albums had been ripped since the new hard was installed. So I deleted all those albums manually - all those "unknown artist" tracks as well, and started adding the albums back one at a time, which was a nice trip down memory lane with old friends like Tears for Fears, Dire Straits, Pat Metheny and others. I also added a couple of books on tape - the new Carrie Fisher book (it turns out I was not the only kid in junior high that had a really bad crush on her) and a couple of others. I also had gotten down pretty well the fine art of getting my lectures on tape onto the iPod, which requires copying the video tracks and converting them to iPod format, which is pretty time-consuming, but lets me listen to the more audio-friendly lectures when on the road.
So that's what I'm up to tonight - downloading albums and copying lectures ... if I can remember all the steps.