Down Day, Down Week

Posted by Philip in General

It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact.  Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad.  I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity.  So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in.  Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked.  I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete.  So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives.  Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:

1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another.  12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.

Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000.  That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day.  That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow.  It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.