Backing Up the Known Universe
After completing the epic Tuesday night slog yesterday evening (meet Miss 17, go for coffee, buy groceries, pick up Miss 13, change her into football kit, drop her a football, walk Miss 17 home, clear up kitchen, pick up Miss 13 from football, go home, make dinner, eat, wash up, etc, etc, etc), I started sorting out the files on my other half’s laptop.
There’s a story here. My other half is good at stress testing laptops. She’s had something like four in a row over the last ten years, and has destroyed them all – not through misuse – just by using them to destruction. Along the way I have taken her data each time, and dumped it onto the next laptop in an “Old Laptop” folder – containing documents, photos, and so on.
So we get to last night. The current laptop – bought second hand from where I work – is on it’s last legs. The touch-pad buttons no longer work properly, and the battery is shot to pieces – if you pull the cable the laptop lasts perhaps a minute before hibernating itself.
“We need to get everything uploaded to Google Drive – then I’ll buy you a Chromebook for your birthday”.
“Ok”.
Why do I say these things without really thinking about the true scale of the problem ? It turns out she had somewhere in the region of fifteen gigabytes of documents, and fifteen gigabytes of photos stored throughout the old laptop folders. I rationalised it all down into a half-way sensible folder structure (which took hours), and then kicked off the Google client software to start uploading. By then it was 2am.
At 7am this morning, after getting out of the shower I had a look to see how the laptop was doing. It was still going. While tinkering, I also did something I’ve been promising for ages. We have a network disk drive at home – it has all of the old childrens photos and videos on it. She wanted that uploaded into Google Drive too – except the client software wouldn’t use a mapped drive. I set it going copying the files just before I left for work.
Nearly nine hours later, I got home from work, and had a look at the laptop to see how it was doing – about 75% of the way through copying from the network drive to the laptop – it had also started uploading THOSE files. Sixty gigabytes worth of them.
If you stopped reading this some time ago, I don’t blame you – but this soporific adventure explains my absence from the internet over the last 24 hours.
In other news, work was a bit of a nightmare. I can’t write about that though. I suppose I can write about getting through five or six cups of coffee during the day. It had no effect. I really do suspect I have become immune to caffeine.
One more thing. I have had a stiff neck all day (all say “ahhh”) – because my other half was cold in bed last night, and engineered a cuddle out of me to keep herself warm. Here’s the thing nobody ever tells you about spooning – there is nowhere for the guy’s arm to go. I always end up with it folded up above me on the pillow, and my head resting on it. I imagine once asleep I probably ended up twisted all over the place – hence the nightmarish stiff neck I woke up with this morning.
Anyway. Enough. This was a blog post about nothing at all. I promise to find something more interesting next time.