Happy Labor Day

As a kid, I used to look forward to Labor Day and watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I never really associated Labor Day and the heartbreak of the summer vacation being over. As an adult however, being a teacher for over 31 years, Labor Day has always been a time of stress and going back to work with a new set of students…very stressful. But now, as a working photographer, Labor Day is a time to appreciate my clients and say thank you for allowing me to provide you with the photographs that your business needs. I am very gratful for my loyal clients.

Rotten Luck

When it rains, it pours. My computer died a couple of weeks ago and I had to bring it in for service. They thought that the drives had to be erased and and the operating system re-installed. This took about 4 days. Luckily I have my laptop and my wife’s computer and the one in the studio. I had a small job to do and tried all 3 of these machines and was most comfortable on my wife’s computer. This meant throwing her off the machine for a day but she used the iPad so all was good (eventually.)

So I got my computer back (very happy that they didn’t charge me anything) and got to work on restoring my backup. About 4 hours into the restore (almost half done) the computer screen goes completely black. I could not get the machine to boot up again. So, I take everything apart again and bring it back for repair. This time, they have trouble getting the machine to boot so, it’s another week of diagnosis and repair. This time, they had to replace parts so, it was not free. I was shocked that they were able to get it working again. Because I had no confidence in getting my machine back, I ordered a new machine which will not be arriving for about a month. I couldn’t be without a computer for that long so, I paid for the repair of my old machine. (I didn’t realize that my “top of the line” computer was actually almost 7 years old and technology has passed us by.)

Now, I have to try the restore of the backup again onto the repaired machine, but this time I see that my external data drive with all of my client’s photos is dead. Fortunately, the backup is good. My client data is 7.5 Terabytes on a 5 disk RAID array. After emailing back and forth with tech support we determine that the array is really dead. So, I think I’ll keep my 5 data drives and put them into a new array enclosure, but lo and behold, they are no longer manufactured. So, where do I turn? EBAY. I found one drive for sale at auction (with several bidders.) Now my luck is improving…I win the auction (although a little more expensive than I was hoping.) Meanwhile, my computer’s internal drive is restored and so far, everything seems to be working.

So, the replacement used RAID array finally came and it took about an hour to get it up and running, another hour to get it working with the computer and it is going to be a few days to restore the 7.5 Terabytes of client data to it.  And when this is all done, and everything working again, my new computer will be arriving and I’ll have to start all over again. So, if you have been wondering what I’ve been doing for the past 2 weeks, there it is.