Email reading and photo integrity verifying

Today I was checking my backlog of emails that I received while I was away.

The other thing that I did was to get the photos that I took while I was away onto my computer. Since I took more photos than I have hard-drive space for, this meant ordering some new hard drives. I decided to replace one of my 1.5TB drives with a 3TB drive.

Since I use 2 backups for each drive, this meant that I ordered two 3TB drives - one for use as the main drive, one for first backup, and the two 1.5TB backup drives of the drive it is replacing can act as the second backup. The 1.5TB drive it is replacing will just be a spare drive, I guess Mauser might use it.

In the mean time, I replaced one of the hard drives in the PC with one that I took away and had the holiday photos on it. At first the PC didn't recognise the new drive. Then after restarting, it wouldn't output anything to the monitor. I switched it off and tried again, but still the same.

I disconnected the drive and started the PC again, and still no output to the monitor. I switched the monitor off and then on again. Still no output to the screen. Then after a few seconds, the standard PC start-up splash screen popped up on the monitor, and the PC was working okay.

So I switched it off again, and plugged in the drive again. Switched it on again, and now it detected the drive and worked okay. Computers, eh?

I then did a binary compare between the holiday photos stored on that drive and the backup copies stored on the other drive I took with me, and the laptop drive. (The other drive ran out of space, so half the backup was on that drive, and the other half on the laptop).

Doing the compare against the files on the laptop was tricky because there didn't seem to be anyway to connect the laptop to my PC. (Connecting Win7 and XP computers to the same network / homegroup seems to be impossible). I had to copy the files from the laptop to a CF card, then connect the CF card to my computer, and do the binary compare against the files on my computer. Since there were many more images on the laptop than can fit on the CF card I was using, it was a case of rinse and repeat until all the images had been compared.

But I am now done. Currently I only have one backup of some files, but it will hopefully only be a few days until the new drives arrive, and then I can get everything sorted and back to two backups. In the meantime, I can work on my holiday photos, the first job being to geocode all the images. I will probably be doing that tomorrow.