efoxley.com | dope

Ugh. Over the past few years, when we go on trips/vacations/flight/road trips, I carry my case of GoPros with all the attachments, media, slew of batteries, etc. I’ve been more into taking videos with the ambitions of creating epic home videos. I’ve got a lot of great footage. I also take vids from the DashCam to show the drives. Even hired a narrator for some of the vids. Seriously.

But my issues have been around backing up while on the road. One such recent trip was through White Sands and Carlsbad. The drive was, in total, about 8ish hours. So on the first night after White Sands and before Carlsbad, I worked to clear off the media card from the DashCam and all the GoPro vids I had taken – as well as phone pics/vids.

The problem I ran into was file-size limits on uploads to the various clouds I use – OneDrive, Amazon Photos, Dropbox, etc. I sat in the hotel uploading – and ran into limits. So had to split the clouds. Limited while traveling using my company laptop, VPN issues stood in the way and the security features on it prevented me from using flash drives.

Then – when I got home, it was picking the files from each cloud and trying to combine into one folder I could start to work with in Premiere. Did I miss any? Ugh.

Question then – why not just have multiple cards and not upload? Why are you doing this, Dave? I don’t have a good answer. I have dozens of cards. I think I’m just paranoid of losing the data or the cards during the trip, which I’ve never done …

I think I’ve solved by using a script I found on our NAS to allow remote access on my laptop – I can now upload pretty much anything of any size using the 80tbs of storage on the NAS – from any computer or phone anywhere in the world. But it has really made me realize just how fragmented all of my media is currently. Using all these work-arounds and various clouds has made it pretty frustrating.

I use Amazon Photos for all photos from all devices which is unlimited in storage with no degradation/reduction of quality/size – all devices backing up to it, with all family members able to access. But my end-all with all video is to have everything backed up to the NAS, and THAT uploaded to remote storage, with only a desktop that has ‘open projects’. Still working on killing my YouTube account (can’t stand ads and restrictions) and host on the NAS, access via PLEX.

Working on all this. It’s a lot of work.

And I still have over 20 old HHDs sitting in the closet with a lot of data to archive …

I promised in our 2017 Holiday Update that I would spend more time with /dope updates … but when logging in today, noticed things have gone awry and the formatting/auto-condensing is not functioning properly. May have to reboot /dope.

Ugh. Been 16 months since my last post. Here’s why: Database was corrupted.

Was one of those “I’ll fix it when I get around to it” things. I finally got around to it. Sheesh!

More updates coming! I’ve been away so long – I’m going to have to find myself around here …

So – I decided to purchase an SSD Drive for both Gavin’s and My computer. Installation on Gavin’s beast was fairly quick (game conversions, mostly). Mine has been another story. One takes for granted all the software and setup used over a 2 year period. What turned out to be a weekend project of ‘switching drives’ has turned in to a full-blown rebuild.

In the meantime, I have 3 video projects (our Spring Break Trip to CA, a recent work-related paint-ball fight, and some archives of old cam footage of the kids) in limbo on my old hard-drive. I will get to it, but I have to get this SSD fully set.

In the meantime … 2 pics of the kids below on July 4 while shopping.

After about 4 years, I updated the index over the past week. Will be updating subsequent directories shortly to match theme.

So the Pics section of the site is struggling a tad, of late. I attempted to upgrade to new coding, and it kind of threw everything off … oops.

I kind of had a heart murmur after that, because I wasn’t sure if by doing that tweak if I had lost all 3500+ photos I had uploaded to the site over the past 10 years were gone. But they’re still there.

So now I’m in the process of backing up those pics and rebuilding that part of the site.

Just an FYI.

Beginning final steps to have site theme updated for new year. Stay Tuned …

1st post of new dope. Deleted everything over the weekend. More to come shortly.