It is spring back here in the Northwest. I came home to daffodils and the current bush in bloom and the pear and maple trees in leaf. Today at the Fill the sky was full of swallows, which made me inordinately satisfied. The swallows are back, which tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world is still set right. There was a lot of migratory activity, way too many Robins around to be local birds, and the ones on territory were having a fit chasing off the clueless out of towners. The winter ducks, like the Wigeons, are still thick, but there are big rafts of Bufflehead in the lake, and I saw a group of Ring-necked Ducks, which I have not seen all winter.
It is an interstitial moment in my busy spring schedule, between work last week in Chicago and week after next in DC. The last assignment is delivered. I can work on other projects, but it seems far too much time is generally taken up with managing the files. Just making sure they're all in their triplicated places and up to date. For my off site storage I use internal hard drives that I've replaced with bigger ones, which means some of my data is scattered across drives as small as 60gb. They're old style IDE drives, formatted for PCs, and I've been having a time making sure I still have a means to access them. My last external drive box bit the dust and I replaced it with a nifty USB to IDE cable, but for some reason the Mac is balking at reading these drives, or at reading more than one in a row.
I have a stack of newer SATA drives, since I've upped the capacity in my Mac Pro, and I have a decommissioned Drobo that once held four drives, and that seems to no longer have a place in my backup regime. It's going on Ebay. The Drobo is problematic and slow—I once tried to use it to back up one of my full terabyte drives, and it took 29 hours to transfer the data. Then I used a SATA cabled box, and it took under two hours. So now all my data fits on seven hard drives, ranging from 250 to 1000gb. These will live across the street at my mother-in-law's house.
So long as I don't spend entire days at these tasks, and I can get out and count the ducks and do my Daily Photo, life is in balance.
Comments