I’m part way through the most stressful data wrangling project of my entire time taking photos, and I expect this rant to rival the process in terms of tedium. The movement part isn’t scary, I deal with that shit weekly, the fear is wholly rooted in the fact I’d not spun any of my old drives in years (some probably 5+ years…) – these drives being, in many cases, the single location of my work. The concern being that I’d left it so long that I’d never get the chance to back them up!!! I was avoiding even just plugging any of these in out of concern as to how I’d handle losing terabytes at a time of priceless media, priceless because it’s irreplaceable until I can travel through time.
The goal is to get my catalogue into the cloud, partly to create a non-physical backup (in case of fire/drive failure) but also to avoid endlessly flipped drives in and our to look for one photo – now I get to access everything all from one zone!!! I ended up deciding that Google One was my best bet, mainly because of their soon to realised status as the megalith of the meta verse and I’d bet my bottom dollar that they’re not going anywhere… I didn’t expect Google to be basically the cheapest option for hot cloud-storage of +10tb – let alone that the service can preview raws, and is faster at doing some in chrome than Bridge, albeit 32gb of Ram and an 8gb graphics card…. And who’da thunk it.. but searching is pretty fast too…. If only I’d given an ounce of consideration to naming conventions in the first 9 years of my photography. And when I said cheap early I mean comparatively, the shit is crazy expensive with me spending at least $720 a year just to park them D: thankfully there are no access fees unlike the filthy bastard that is AWS. I did however find iDrive who will store 10tb for 70 bucks a year(!!!!!) but its cold storage and they charge you to access it, so idrive was a lil but to cold however I’ll look to something like that in the future whenever I’ve got a drive that I’m confident is without any unseen images.
Stress aside, which has been difficult, I’ve ran 4 drives so far and they have all span up fine and have comfortably withstood spinning for the entire 60-80hrs it takes to get one of these drives uploaded. I must admit, haven’t felt so comfortable in quite a while…. Mainly because I’ve been stressing about this since before moving to Canada – especially carting most of my drive up here. But realistically I probably would’ve brought them even had I clouded them back from aus. It’s painfully slow but I’m not complaining, 70hrs for 2tb never sounded so great.. I’m just waiting for my provider to start asking why I’m uploading 10tb in a month.
Wish me luck.
Dillon Stephens and Billy Bones on the Transalpina
The same road (if you can call it that) as above but a different section and about 4 hours earlier. That morning was probably the coldest I’ve ever felt… I’ve been in colder temps but never this unprepared. A long shot different to us cooking in 40 degree Corsican weather just a handful of days prior.
This vista is about 60 degrees to the right of the above frame and maybe 30 minutes earlier. The mountain range (Carpathians) just seemed to never end, in every direction.
