I've had lots of things I've wanted to blog but I've been pre-occupied with getting my new computer up and running. The hard drive on the old computer decided to die a month ago and we decided not to invest any $$$ to fixing a 3 year old computer, which is good and bad I suppose, but we were not planning on getting a new computer but after a week of working on the old laptop decided it really wasn't an option! Let me tell you how awesome Backblaze is though. Backblaze is an offsite backup system that works behind the scenes constantly backing up your files. Daryl was very much against me doing something like this a few years ago when I signed up with Mozy, I had been bugging him for is ok when that computer had a little crash, we were lucky enough to save the hard drive on that computer and recover all my data, so needless to say, I signed up for Mozy without his ok after that. He has finally come around to it being ok!
I switched to backblaze from Mozy a few months ago due to Mozy's outrageous price increase ($5.00 to about $30.00). You never know how good or bad off-site storage is until you need it, and at that point, it's too late, right? Well I have to say I was very impressed! 90% of my data is on an external hard drive, so I knew when the computer failed even if Backblaze didn't live up to what it was supposed to do I would still have my 40,000+ photos and thousands of digital supplies and most of my documents. But the things that always worries me are the thousands of emails and things I've saved in Outlook, would I really be able to recover all of my contacts and saved emails?
I purchased a new copy of Microsoft Office from Academic Superstore. This is a great site if you or your children are in school, there are tons of programs that you can get at a very discounted rate. I downloaded what looked to be my outlook data file from Backblaze and saved it to my computer, I installed outlook and when you set it up the first time it asks you if you want to import data, so I pulled in the file that I hoped contained all my data, and like magic outlook opened with EVERYTHING, looking just like I had left it a few weeks ago. I was seriously doing the happy dance!
What I have learned or I guess reminded, because I did know that my Photoshop Elements Catalog was not being backed up, is that I need to back up the catalog separately so that I don't lose all the tagging and organizing of the photos, which I hadn't done. This was actually ok since I can also access it from the laptop, but not ok when I had a space issue on the EHD that I was backing up to and in the end couldn't get to the catalog on either computer, and had to resort a data recovery tool to find the catalog! So now I am putting a reminder on my calendar to back it up monthly along with iTunes. Silly me thought that once I downloaded iTunes on my new computer and singed into my account all of my purchases would appear. Well, no, apparently they don't. Apparently you are also supposed to be making a back up straight out of iTunes of all of your iTunes stuff. So, I'm not to sure what is going to happen the first time I plug in my iPhone and iPad . . . . how soon is icloud coming?
As of last night I finally have PSE up and running on both the computers along with a new program, adobe Lightroom. I've been hearing/reading a lot about this program and am going to give it a try, the biggest draw for me is that you can batch edit photos that need the same type of editing, that will save a ton of time. I'm having some attachment issues with my photoshop catalog though, so I will probably be keeping it up to date until I'm more comfortable in Lightroom.
So, all that to say that has been what I've been doing the last month, along with all of the end of year activities that were going on with the kids. This school year went by so quickly and I now have a 2nd grader and a high schooler! YIKES!!!! High School!!!! It really doesn't seem real. He doesn't let me take many pictures of him these days, but I twisted his arm before his 8th Grade Dance to let me take a few ~
ok, time to get on with my day, happy Saturday everyone!
