So, we had to push back flights yet again as we still don’t have visas. However, I’m taking advantage of this limbo time to get some computer chores out of the way before the craziness of kids with jetlag and setting up a new house kick in.

First on that list was doing a massive back up and reorganization of files on my computer. I do back up regularly, but I had some external harddrives that needed to be added to and lots of duplicate files.

Why Back Up? Computers fail. External Harddrives can fail too. Houses burn down. Things get stolen. Natural disasters happen. Having all our data in multiple places means that if something bad happens, we don’t lose the data–especially the pictures.

Why Not the Cloud/Dropbox/Online Storage? I use online storage a bit, particularly dropbox and google drive. However, I take A LOT of photos and they are big. That means paying for extra space. Also, we often live places with really slow internet, which means upload time takes forever especially if uploading a bunch at a time. And finally, online means way easier to hack then having to literally break into our house and then into our safe.

So, back to the organizing:

When we went to India, we had two external harddrives–one we left at my mom’s in a safe and one we took with us. They weren’t identical though, as the one at my mom’s had files we didn’t take to Delhi. And then of course, I added files to the Delhi one without updating my mom’s. Once back in the US, I got 2 new harddrives. One for doing Time Machine back ups from my mac (essentially the whole computer in one fell swoop) and then one where I saved files individually, particularly ones related to my photography business.

So this means we have four harddrives that all had different data. And the two original ones don’t like interacting with my Mac as they were PC harddrives to start with.

SO, yesterday I had three of the harddrives (the Time Machine one staying the same) and two laptops (mine and my DH’s pc) and spent hours reorganizing, deleting duplicate files, and making sure each harddrive had everything needed. Big advantage of grandparents and Daddy being available!

Now we have: 1 harddrive for DH’s PC files.  2 harddrives with my complete files–1 to stay with my mom and 1 to come with us.  My laptop I only have the best of the best family photos and then my professional photos. The rest are on the harddrive to keep memory and storage space free on my laptop.

Whew!

If you need help organizing your photos, stay tuned for my next blog post 🙂

PS: We went to a lavender farm down the road today. It was great! Fun play area where they turned a shed into a playhouse (DD’s favorite) and had a large sandbox filled with construction trucks (DS’ favorite). Plus lavender picking and treats!