Over the last several weeks, I've discovered the value of gigabytes. I'm not even entirely sure that GB stands for gigabyte and I'm not exactly sure what they do. But I do know this: without them, your computer doesn't work very well. My computer started giving me "disk full" warnings a few weeks ago. I would just ignore them and continue with my business. Then the warnings got a bit more explicit: "must free space". I discovered that out of 152.35 GB of space on a hard-drive, I didn't even have enough to burn pictures to a disc. It was INTENSELY frustrating to be told to clear space, but then when you try, your computer tells you it can't. Hmmm... So off to Best Buy I went to get an external hard-drive that everyone keeps telling me about. "Oh, just store all your video and pictures to it! It's soo easy!" Easy, shmeasy. I have a Mac and while most things with a Mac ARE easy, this has not been. I hooked it up, transferred my entire iPhoto library to it (5,000+ pictures), deleted the pictures from my computer hard-drive and, walla! All my pictures were gone from BOTH hard-drives. My heart raced, my palms got clammy and I immediately called Mac support. Thankfully they got my pictures back. I was on the phone with him for over an hour trying to gain some understanding about how to use this external hard-drive, but to be honest, once I got my pics back, I sort of tuned out. At that point, I just started deleting individual photos that I didn't need. I did this until I had enough space to burn the rest of them to a disc. And I have burned most of Avery's life to CD's. I have also created a DVD of all of her home video so I could delete the video from my computer. I burned it yesterday and it took NINE HOURS!!!!! But as a result, I have 97.94 GB!!!!! Woo Hoo!
So I still don't get how to use this external hard-drive. If anyone has any helpful hints, send them my way. It can't be as hard as I am making it. I'm not an idiot. I can usually figure things like this out. But after the scare of deleting all my pictures, I'm a bit hesitant to store anything on it. I'll be blogging a bit later about our family vacation. Yeah, that's the one that I promised almost a month ago... I just didn't have the hard-drive space to download the pics and the video of Avery. I think I've got it under control now. We'll see...
3 comments:
Wow, that would have made me pass out to think I'd lost all my photos & video! Glad everything got resolved.
Brian has our computer (iMac) set up to a device called a Time Capsule. It backs up our computer on a regular basis and I *think* it acts as an external drive too. Anyway if you ever have any computer-related questions Brian can usually answer them - and I'll volunteer him to help you if you ever need it! :)
glad you got your pictures back... I would have been terrified. Blake has always worried that I have our whole married life captured on one computer...what did they do before computers???? I can't wait to see you...
OH man! I know that stuff is scary. We have a Mac and had major issues this past fall. I have an external drive, and I had to install it differently since it was a Mac. I thought it didn't work and was ready to take it back- turns out I didn't have it installed...DUHH!!
It's such a beating doing all that backing up and cleaning out to get extra space on your hard drive.
I'm so glad you didn't lose anything.
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