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The answer: clearly more than 1 external hard drive.

The home PC has been acting slow, so I went to defragment the drive. Only the 10 G of space available is not really enough to allow the machine to do a good job of defragmenting. So, I decided to move all the pictures off to the external drive. Only, then it doesn’t make sense for the picture backups to be on that external hard drive. So … I decided to do a backup to DVD after copying the folder to the external drive and before deleting them off the internal drive (I mean, really, those pictures are worth more than gold to me). Four days and 20 disks later (argh, apparently I reached for the CD spindle a couple of times in there), Nero is *finally* checking the disks and I discover that the 3rd (yes, the 3rd of 20) isn’t well formed. It didn’t help that I didn’t think through the settings, so Nero was trying to compress all those nicely compressed JPEGs — that was time I didn’t have to spend.

Maybe the kids and I will go out for Indian tomorrow evening and run by Staples afterward so I can splurge on a 2nd external hard drive and maybe even some of those pens I like. That’ll give me one external drive for all the media of which I am now in possession and then another on which to backup the internal drive and external media drive. I really don’t think it is optional, I must say, so maybe splurge isn’t the best verb.

Society is changing … my home PC is only about 2 years old and before that I successfully managed all of my work and home stuff on the work laptop. Today I have:

• the home desktop at 70 G with one 190 G external drive and another on the way
• the Windows work laptop at 50 G and with no personal stuff on it, it runs close to full at all times (and I bumped the old work stuff off of it years ago, so this is all current stuff)
• and the new Linux work laptop at something less than 50 G (not sure how much, left it at work today)

How is it that with all that hard drive space and computing power I’m feeling limited?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Technology & Society, My Valley Of Love and Delight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.