And yet more...

Still swamped with work for the next few days, but in the meantime the censorship legislation continues apace. As I mentioned a few days ago, there will be a new U.K. law which monitors and records all activity on social networking sites. Yes this will cover Facebook, MySpace, MM and so forth. This one is really important folks:

Now 'Big Brother' targets Facebook

LouLou 658

Lou-Lou

Fluffier posts soon, I promise.

Post No. 300

Well the weekend issue was partially resolved. It seems that the Hogwarts father concerned didn’t tell his wife about our photographic leanings for some strange reason I can’t quite fathom (but I’m guessing we have gained another viewer – welcome dear bloggie reader!) Plus we appear to have been forgiven as my son has now been invited to a party there next weekend.

Rich is going to put our real names on the Fluffytek site, but will embed them in a graphic so Google can’t index them. Of course this doesn’t solve the problem completely, as we're certainly traceable if you try, but nevertheless it solves the problem temporarily, and all’s well that ends well.

End of drama for this month.

LouLou 661

Here's Lou-Lou.

Great heavens, I've just realised this is our 300th post.

Improbable Drive Problems

The biggest problem with digital photography is the sheer volume of data it produces. A typical shoot will generate nearly 4gb of raw files. Some of these get converted to psd for photoshop and most of the time it is easier to keep all the files from a shoot rather than cull the bad ones. You simply never know when you might decide to resurrect a shot you thought was a bit iffy.

In just over two years I've amassed a photo collection of 21,000 files covering 216GB of data. Now obviously there is no real way to create a hard backup of these files. That would be 48 DVD's. It would be 9 BluRay disks which would be an option if I had a BluRay drive. But just writing them to a DVD or BluRay is not enough because these disks often degrade over time, so periodically you need to renew them.

I decided my solution was to use a known method from normal computer data handling. I have the main data on a working PC, then a backup elsewhere. In this case the backup is a purpose build file server. It has 1.3TB of drives arranged as 2 pairs of mirrored drives. So that's 4 drives, 2 of which keep a copy of the data from the other 2. So that's 3 copies of the data, the main PC, the primary drive on the backup and its mirror. To further add protection, the file server has a triple redundant power supply connected to a industrial uninterruptable power supply and a backup generator.

Pretty neat huh? I felt very safe with this setup. Until Thursday morning.

I got up, had my coffee, and then logged into my PC to find that network access to the file server backups was not available. I went to the server and found that 3 of the 4 drives had failed!

Statistically there is no way that 3 out of 4 drives in any PC can fail at once. I've had single drive failures often and know the drives tend only to last a few years in a file server. But for 3 drives to fail without some form of catastrophic failure of the whole system in unheard of. Yet, the 3rd backup drive and the core drive for the OS were fine and dandy.

So my backups of my photography, 3d work, downloaded tutorials and some other stuff was blown away and were it not for the fact that I still have the main PC with the live copy, I would be suicidal by now.

Today I have installed new drives, recreated the mirrors and started to restore the data to the backup. However, I have installed another drive into my main PC and have an additional backup from its main drive to its second drive before it copies to the redundant backup. I'm also going to install a 3rd tier backup that holds a backup of the backup on another machine.

The worst part is that I also lost our entire MP3 music collection and now I have to rip all 400 albums again.

Now if only I could find some software that could do all this for me automatically and keep historic versions, and run regular CRC checks I would be a truly happy man. If you know of such a thing, please let me know. If not, I might just write one. Any one want to buy a backup system designed for a photographer?



This image is of Lou Lou from last year.

A Perfect Storm

At the high risk of annoying my beloved Don, I must regretably report that Morgan Stanley is the first bank to issue a full blown recession alert for the US, warning of a "perfect storm" for consumers as the housing crisis spreads.

In a report "Recession Coming" released yesterday, the bank said the credit crunch had started to inflict some serious damage on US companies, resulting in a sharp slowdown in business investment. It predicts that the Fed's interest rate cuts are too little, too late, and that a recession is inevitable.

The "R" word makes Don and I argue. Oh dear. I really do hope that his fluffy economic view of the future is right, for all our sakes, but for now I remain firmly Chicken Little. In the meantime ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.



I resolved not to blog about economics any more. Clearly I blew it.
Here's Lou-Lou, ready to beat us pessimistic economists into submission.

Thanksgiving Fluffy

Too tired to blog these past few days. And Rich hasn’t got a rant left in him at the moment. Too much work does that to you. And I don’t feel much like ranting either. Head playing up, plus there’s all sorts of rubbishy thoughts flying around in my head. Need to pause, and think a little.

So, unusually for me, I’m not waffling on today. Instead, I’m going to make you look at one of MY favourite artists for a change. Yes, yes, I know you come for the nudes. She’s at the bottom, O.K.? But I like looking at other stuff too. It makes me feel better.

If you haven’t come across the amazing painter, Craig Mullins before, let me recommend you look at his work (Click here, and then click on Top Rated). His use of light and shadow are absolutely amazing. This is one of my favourites:



Changing the subject, of course it's Thanksgiving for all you sexy Yanks: So hope you all have a good one!

Your Thanksgiving Fluffy this year is Lou-Lou.



Rich’s images of Lou-Lou were featured on A Flower A Day on 18th Nov. Yes they renamed it, but I think it’s possibly lost its unique marketing angle as a result.
I don’t normally mention when Rich gets featured on these sites, but he needs cheering up today.