[Alliecat]

*Rant alert*

AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I hate computer gadgets! I hate the techy crap required with digital photo anything. It's 3:45 a.m. & I am once again wasting time thanks to stupid technical problems.
So I have this potentially great opportunity, my first contract with a stock photo agency, & I am preparing my first batch of photos to send them. Well, the first half of the first batch since it's taking so long. I have to scan them all from my (perfectly safe & storage-stable) negatives, then touch up all the specks, & in all that will be probably 250 hours' work.
I bought a brand new Verbatim 500GB "Store & Go Superspeed 3.0" drive to back all these pix up... supposed to be this brilliant wonderful product, hot-pluggable, blah blah blah... so I've backed up files onto it somewhere between 4 & 6 times, total, & tonight it died. Froze my computer, the drive is inaccessible, when I do (after about 5 minutes) get the "properties" window, it says there is no free space on it. (I used a few % of the 500GB so far.)
I have to get some of these files off my laptop since it's getting full. Now it has taken me 3 hours to back up the pix, 1GB at a time, on my trusty li'l old 1GB flash drive, onto the old old computer which still runs WinME, because that's currently the only place to put them.
I'm just livid. Of course it's past the store's 30-day return period so now I'll have to phone Verbatim & do battle with their bureaucracy, probably have to ship the frelling thing to the States so they can decide whether there's anything wrong with it.
There goes tomorrow's free time.
I understand that any digital storage device you buy can/will fail, which makes me think I should just say WTF & buy the first one I come across on eBay for a few bucks instead of wasting all the time I did choosing this one, & I was looking for a little flash drive as a 2nd backup. Now my backup is just as likely to be CDs. Tons of them. (And yes, I know they aren't fail-proof either, which further heightens my frustration.) A digital friend was telling me about his backups; 2 external hard drives, 4 portable hard drives, something like that, & this strikes me as so ridiculous. I am not a techie; I am not going to be building network systems, RAID boxes or whatever... Yes, I am old fashioned & like simple processes because I have better things to do with my time than mess with computer glitches. I'm just disgusted with the whole thing & the next person who tells me I should switch to digital is going to get a smack upside the head.
Film was so SIMPLE. Photo album, box of negatives. They are not going to evaporate when I take the elastic off the box.
*rant alert light*OFF*

Sorry, guys. Had to vent somewhere.

[Pioneer]

No apology needed. That was an excellent rant!

[mtansley]

Although I sympathize with you I still enjoyed your rant. <----- although I do feel your pain.

[Parallax]

No apology needed. That was an excellent rant!

Yep. As rants go, that was a dandy; and justified as well.

[jolepp]

+1 : excellent rant, can relate

[grhazelton]

Truly, I feel your pain. I really, really do!

Hear then my tale of woe....

I had an USB external 500g box I was using for image storage. The idea was that it wouldn't be used much, and should last much longer. Well, perhaps it was a power glitch - no UPS at that time - but the drive was trashed. Probably trashed the FAT. I've been unable to find any recovery program that would do anything. I should probably open the box and attempt to mount the bare drive in my drive in a drawer, on my new machine and have at it. The USB aspect apparently is difficult for recovery programs.

I then bought an external Raid 1 box and loaded it with two 500g Seagate Barracuda drives. Happiness? No, both drives died within minutes of each other! This meant that the advantage of a Raid 1, being able to survive a single drive failure, was gone. Quite a number of customers had similar experiences with these particular drives. Seagate promised a "fix;" it didn't work. I now have two expensive paperweights. I'll never buy Seagate again. Grrrrrr.

And to add insult to injury, I'd scanned in the great majority of decades of film shooting. Of course I have the negatives and slides, but the wasted time really galls.

Since then I've built a new machine, with two 1T WD "raid designed" drives in a Raid 1 array. I also have two WD 1.5T drives in hot swap drawers, for father-son backups, and I use BackBlaze cloud backup service. At about $60 per year for unlimited storage it seems a bargain. I was using BackBlaze when the external Raid died and thus could recover some files, but I hadn't been on the service long enough for everything to have been uploaded. BackBlaze uploads whenever the computer is on, so I don't have to think about it.

So far everything is fine, The Monolith (my big black machine) hums along almost silently, and BackBlaze says that all but 865files are backed up to the cloud.

Oh, yes. I also have a hefty UPS which will automatically perform a proper shut down, so that the RAID doesn't have to rebuild itself.

Life in Control Central is good, except for that little, nagging worry...what have I overlooked?

[Lloydy]

I had storage problems earlier this week, my ancient PC has 500gb of memory, and I have 2 separate drives, another 500gb for PC backup and t 1tb drive for pictures. My tame techie set up a auto backup program for it all and it seemed fine.

Until I went to download a few pictures off the camera card and it said "NO WAY - EVERYWHERE IS FREAKIN FULL !" and upon investigation - it was, the PC and the 2 separate drives were rammed full!

It took me a whole 2 days to sort it out, and I'm going to kill my pet techie when I catch him. Everything was backing up in the night as it was set to do, that bit was no problem. The problem was, it was just heaping one backup on top of the previous ones and not just saving changes !

I feel you pain Alliecat, there was a point when I thought I'd lost the lot. It's not a nice feeling. I think I'll spend a bit of money and use remote storage in future.

[twitch]

Ouch.

I do agree with your conclusion though, do not bother to research "which brand has the most reliable HDD", there is no answer to it and it is the wrong question to ask anyway. Buy any new HDD of the size, speed and type you want. Your digital storage strategy must not rely on any one (or even 2) HDD's being 100% reliable as none of them are. I ignor brands and instead concentrate on having idiot-proof automated full backups with 1 copy on site, and 1 copy off site. Haven't lost a file in 10 years despite losing a few HDD's along the way.

[Alliecat]

I should probably open the box and attempt to mount the bare drive in my drive in a drawer, on my new machine and have at it. ....Since then I've built a new machine, with two 1T WD "raid designed" drives in a Raid 1 array. ...

See, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I am NOT into doing.

CHAPTER TWO
*rant continues*

So, having gone to bed after 7 a.m. after the very long backup process onto the old old computer, then wasting a lot of time looking around on eBay & wherever else for affordable flash drives, I am wrecked.

I phoned Staples. Of course, since it's past 30 days, they don't care. I suggested they might consider overlooking that since it was probably junk to begin with & we are regular, loyal customers... No joy.
She transferred me to Verbatim. In the States, of course. I got some mostly-intelligible girl on a terrible connection which made her sound like she was in the bottom of a giant box of cotton balls. I could barely hear her; she could barely hear me. I explained the problem & got dead silence.
"Hello?"
"HELLOOO?"
A faint voice from the other end: "Can you hear me?"
I tried again.
More silence.
Apparently no one has taught her to make some sort of comment, to tell the customer she's checking something or looking something up, or SOMETHING, rather than dead silence while she's doing it.
More rounds of "Hello?"
She wanted to know if I'd tested the USB ports & tried it in another computer. The ports are fine. I didn't tell her I'm afraid to plug it into the old computer in case it kills the whole thing.
She said she'd give me an authorization # to return it, "After which.... .... ... after which... ...." (apparently lost her place in the script she was reading) "... um... just a minute..."
It must have been her first day on the job, because she didn't appear to know exactly what happens after which.
Finally -- and this was actually less hassle than I expected -- they e-mailed me info to return the drive. Because it has to be trackable it's going to cost me $30, (Canada Post, are you listening? Your rates SUCK!!!) which is almost half what I paid for it.
Verbatim's instructions add that you better contact customs to find out what forms you need to make sure they won't have to pay any tax on it, because they WON'T DO IT.
So...
Look up USPS website. Nothing about tax-free postal limits. Use Google for US customs. Find a bunch of stuff about clearing customs when travelling.
Phone 1-800-ASK-USPS. Sit on hold. Ask clerk what are the tax-free limits on package values coming into the USA. Explain twice because she doesn't understand. Wait 5 minutes while she looks for information. She says "we don't have that information".
The post office doesn't know what the duty-free limit is on their mail??????
Finally asked local postal clerk. She thinks it's similar to Canada's numbers.
Post question to Yahoo Answers. Post question here.
Go look for packaging to mail $70 doorstop. Plan what to say on the product review I will leave on Staples' website. Waste lovely sunny spring-y day indoors.
I wonder... Since they want me to box the thing with 1-2" of packing around it (what's the point, when it's dead?) Dad says they probably intend to try refurbishing it, which makes me wonder whether the replacement I get will be new or in fact someone else's salvaged refurb dud.
AND, though the product info all says what a great 7-year warranty they have, & that replacements are warranteed for the remaining time, phone girl says the warranty is only good for one replacement.
WTF?
AAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH, again!!!!

Long... sorry... but I'm thinking there will be further chapters.
Meanwhile I'm a bit stalled on the photo project till I find somewhere to put my completed images so I'll have room for more.
Stupid, stupid technology.

[twitch]

Ouch. But seriously, don't wait for a resolution to this before backing up 250hrs of work. Run out and buy any HDD that will fit you work and back it up asap.

By the way, full backups should take <10 or 20 minutes after the first one is done and be automated, any backup solution that can't do this doesn't deserve the label. Backups can, and should, be very simple.

[Alliecat]

Yeah, no kidding -- I've got a bunch of CD-Rs that we got at a yard sale & I'm inclined to use those till I get a flash drive or 2. There is only 1 electronics store within 2.5 hrs' travel time, so I'll have to order something, but wow, I haven't even made any $$ off this job yet; I hate having to fork out more. But heck no, I'm not waiting around for them to send me another piece of crap, & I won't be able to trust the replacement anyway!
("How could you do this? I'll never trust you again....")
It took a long time because the old computer is just really old... & I could only take 1GB at a time on the little flash drive I currently have, so had to do it piecemeal...

[nikigunn]

Phone 1-800-ASK-USPS. Sit on hold. Ask clerk what are the tax-free limits on package values coming into the USA. Explain twice because she doesn't understand. Wait 5 minutes while she looks for information. She says "we don't have that information".
The post office doesn't know what the duty-free limit is on their mail??????

The people at 1-800-ASK-USPS aren't employed by the post office. That's outsourced. My mom complained about their quality of service when they were hired (she's a retired postal clerk.) Plus, since it is Customs, asking the post office would be like asking them how the processing of a passport is going even though they were the acceptance agent.

From what I could see on my brief viewing of the Customs website is that an informal entry is needed for items under $2,000 so I think you're fine but I didn't dig too far. I've bought several items from overseas through the internet and never been charged a duty fee, but I've never sent anything for warranty work overseas so that may be different.

[Tom S.]

If you haven't sent it in yet, or shot it, try deleting the drivers on your computer and reinstalling them. Then go to their website and check for updated drivers. Why not check there first? Sometimes updates require the original driver be already loaded.

Good luck!

[altopiet]

It's good to blow off steam once in a while, but as Forrest Gump said - My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." . If only life was simple, with no problems, it would have been wonderful, but in the end rather boring I think.

[redrockcoulee]

It's good to blow off steam once in a while, but as Forrest Gump said - My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." . If only life was simple, with no problems, it would have been wonderful, but in the end rather boring I think.

Yes but why can't they all be turtles at least once in each of our lives?

My wife learnt the hard way about not backing up and harddrive failures, even ignored my nagging to do so. The rants were enjoyable to read in that like any good rant there were excellent points made and I think we can all identify and have emptily with that feeling of