Well, not completely crashed, but it was smoking for awhile. The fear of a complete computer failure has made me somewhat paranoid over the years. I make my living as a Family and Event Photographer in Portland Oregon and I cannot afford to have a computer failure of any kind. And since I have been using a computer for work or school before there was an internet and have never had a massive breakdown, I consider myself due. So, several weeks ago I decided to protect my system with a “tool of the cloud” and purchased a subscription to Carbonite. What a colossal mistake that was and it appears that I am not alone in this thinking (see references like Vinny Carpenter’s Blog).
My first problem was the vast quantities of stored data in the form of photographic files, nearly a terabyte as of this writing. The real nightmare would be to lose all my wedding and portrait photographs. Now because of the large amount of data, Carbonite took nearly six days to do the initial backup. During that time my computer was running at 8088 speed. It reminded of the days when you could type faster than the type-ahead buffer could keep up. It is extremely funny to watch a complete sentence flash before your eyes after you stopped typing. Anyway, I digress.
After the initial back-up was complete, I noticed a strange phenomenon occur. My auxiliary external drive began to shrink in size. Every day it became smaller and smaller, well not the drive, I mean the space on the drive, you know what I mean. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and finally gave up and called my good friend and fellow CPU geek, Rich Castaneda. He and I worked on it for several days. Then the computer began to slow to a complete crawl. I literally had no space left on the main drive or the external drive. Where had it gone? And more importantly, who took it?
After two days of hair pulling, mine not Rich’s, he found the culprit that was eating my drive real estate like some insane pac-man on steroids. It was Carbonite. Once I uninstalled it and put the system back the way it was before in the introduction of the dreaded beast, everything worked great. My dual core was humming along and all my drive space returned. All thanks to Rich and the guys at TSP Technology. Now I will live to shoot another day. Oh, by the way, no hard drive was hurt during the shooting of this photo session.
Have you had an experience like mine? If so, write and tell me about what happened and what you did to overcome it.
I noticed a few new gray hairs sprouting on you during the week of the computer meltdown. And you were talking in your sleep about needing more space. Glad it all worked out!
Just wanted you to know that the gray hair was caused by the hot smoke, nothing else