Rboc

May 4, 2016 — nicoleandmaggie
  • DH says:  the shower epiphany fairy says to use piano wire
  • TFW the day before you are about to give a talk you check your presentation and your external harddrive has an error that has caused said presentation to disappear.
  • And the silence while you desperately check your automatic backup for a copy.
  • TFW you realize the corrections you made didn’t show up on your harddrive’s backup because it only syncs when you plug in, not when you are working.
  • But thank goodness you at least have a copy you can make changes to and you don’t have to start over from scratch.  I sure hope I caught them all and hope I didn’t make any new slides that are now gone…
  • Before we got our new clothes washer, DH had to buy another pack of underpants because apparently he was the only person in the family who didn’t have enough clothing to last until Tuesday.
  • Latest piece of ridiculousness:  the “room mother” has asked each elementary school student to bring in a single flower on Tuesday morning for Teacher Appreciation Week (to be gathered into a bouquet for the teacher).  At the end of the email was a little passive aggressive note about not letting your child feel left out because of not participating.  She did not translate the email into any of the common non-English languages spoken by school families.  She did not think about the fact that a majority of kids live in apartments and do not have gardens and that Tuesday is not a great day for people who shop on the weekends.  I predict that the school will lose some of its foliage as a result.
  • DH says there is no point in filing a magnet (it doesn’t get smaller).
  • DH says, it took two weeks and $3000, but now when I pull this lever, this magnet spins.
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: . 14 Comments »

14 Responses to “Rboc”

  1. Katie Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 6:39 am

    What is DH making? Sounds cool!

    Reply
  2. Leah Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 7:23 am

    In undergrad, powerpoint was not so common, but we had just started to use it. I had used it some in high school so felt really darn good. I made a sweet presentation with a friend on a research project we had done. I did all sorts of (appropriate) cool stuff, like pictures of our research and procedures — stuff that is simple to do now but was complex then. This was in the mostly film cameras day, so I either borrowed the one digital camera the school newspaper owned (I was a staff photographer) or scanned in my photos.

    I was super careful about saving multiple backups. We made a last minute change day-of, and I dutifully saved and replaced every single backup. Turns out the file had corrupted in this last save. D’oh. And, of course, I had overwritten all my back ups. We had to give the talk from memory with no pictures and drawing graphs on the board. So frustrating.

    Reply
  3. chacha1 Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 10:30 am

    Backups and backups and backups! I use BackBlaze* and it’s so nice to not have to even think about it. (There is a USB hard drive that I use once in a blue moon when I just want to save an updated copy of a directory or something. However, I make changes to some kind of file basically every time I turn on the laptop, and plugging in the parallel and doing the copy operation most definitely doesn’t happen every time. The husband claims that there is a program that will run the copy automagically when you plug in the parallel, but I notice that he himself does not do this, so I suspect it is not that simple.) Downloading a remotely backed-up file can take a while but I was sure glad to have the option when, five months after subscribing to BackBlaze, my old laptop died.

    *no promotional considerations

    Reply
    • nicoleandmaggie Says:
      May 4, 2016 at 10:31 am

      Everything is backed up, but only at the start, not at the end. :/

      Reply
    • Leah Says:
      May 4, 2016 at 1:40 pm

      Backblaze sounds almost too good to be true. Is it really that amazing and cheap? I totally want to start doing cloud stuff.

      Reply
      • chacha1 Says:
        May 4, 2016 at 4:34 pm

        I think BackBlaze is very fairly priced when you consider their overhead. It took most of a week for the first backup to be completed (running in the background while I did other things).

        Now, if I don’t have the laptop on for a week or more, it takes a good 6-8 hours to suck up the updates; I just close my email, leave the browser open, and let it run overnight. When I needed to download data from the cloud storage, it was a couple of steps and a couple of hours, but ultimately I got what I needed and it was in essentially the same shape (directory trees, even) that I last saw it. It was assembled into a zip file so the extraction was the time-consuming part.

        Honestly, having that service is what gave me the confidence to scan and then shred approximately one ton of old paper records, scrapbooks, etc. Not to mention peace of mind about my eleventy thousand digital photos.

      • Cloud Says:
        May 5, 2016 at 11:51 am

        I also use BackBlaze. It is a bit like magic, as long as you aren’t concerned about your files going into the cloud. There are other cloud based solutions, too. You can spend a lot of time figuring out which one is the best match for your volume of data and frequency of updates, but honestly, the price differences aren’t big. I think BackBlaze works out to something like $5/month for me.

  4. rs Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 2:14 pm

    I use dropbox exactly for the same reason that I don’t have to think about losing anything. It synchronizes continuously and keeps all versions, so if I even need to go back and find anything, there is no issues.

    Reply
  5. Contingent Cassandra Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 5:52 pm

    Reasonably-satisfied Spideroak user here (it starts gobbling memory/CPU capacity now and then, but mostly quietly uploads every save to the cloud, and yes, keeps versions). Price seems reasonable for the peace of mind.

    Reply
  6. Susan Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 6:23 pm

    My IT guy has my desktop and lab computers on Crashplan. I needed it a bit ago when I realized I’d overwritten the running list I keep on my desktop of service-related activities. Getting a copy from a month earlier was quite simple, I’m happy to report.

    Reply
  7. Debbie M Says:
    May 4, 2016 at 8:36 pm

    “shower epiphany fairy” – love that description

    Reply

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