Rounding second base, heading for third...

Originally Posted by RobbiesCornField

Like I said, Rich, you don't have to empty ALL of the adults out of the rack I'll be taking.

There's a chance..he won't!!

I'll admit that I'm likely to be pretty unpredictable these days.

But it is kind of scary how although I don't have any more young animals to clean and feed, life has filled in the time that SHOULD be available already. I've been in the den ALL day today doing stuff on the computers. Got a file server set up to be a centralized backup (RAID 5 with 4 hard drives for safety) of my systems. It was getting ridiculous having these external hard drives all over the place. I think I have enough USB cables to reach to the moon by now. And I had to install a 2TB drive into my new system to hold all these video files I have amassed. HD video makes HUGE files. And now that I have moved from tape, once I download those files from the internal hard drive or RAM in the camcorder, there will only exist a single copy of those files. Hence the backup concerns. In between all this I'm trying to get that inventory onto my shopping cart program. But I'm up to the "Normal het for ...." section right now, so I'm making progress. Of course, I have four full pages of normal hets to key in.....

Sheesh, I think I have 20 terabytes of hard drive space in my den right now! It took me five solid days to backup my main PC to that file server. Ethernet, even using a gigabit network, really isn't all that fast when doing this sort of stuff. Of course, the verify stage adds a lot of time to the backup process.

A friend of mine called up today and asked what I was doing tomorrow (Monday). I had to stop and think for a minute, because this is the first time I can remember someone asking me that question when I didn't have a bunch of animal stuff to do. It was actually a shock. Yeah, I should just keep my head down and work on that price list, but what the heck. I've got to get myself used to this retirement mode of thinking sooner of later.... But it's going to be tough, I think. Been working so hard for so long, it's going to be quite a change.

Invest in a Blu-ray burner, 25GB per disk 50 if you get the duel layer disks. The media is still a little pricey if you do not look for sales but, if it is a permanent back up it is worth having a hard copy. If your system supports SATA it will write to the Blu-ray much faster than transferring it across a 10/100.

(...smiling at last paragraph...)

Rich, I've always wondered who they made those gazillion TB hard drives for (external and internal). Now I know.

Originally Posted by Rich Z

Yeah, I should just keep my head down and work on that price list, but what the heck. I've got to get myself used to this retirement mode of thinking sooner of later.... But it's going to be tough, I think. Been working so hard for so long, it's going to be quite a change.

Just send me the list and I'll put some prices on them and then send you the money for the prices I decided on.

Originally Posted by Khaman

[F in a Blu-ray burner, 25GB per disk 50 if you get the duel layer disks. The media is still a little pricey if you do not look for sales but, if it is a permanent back up it is worth having a hard copy. If your system supports SATA it will write to the Blu-ray much faster than transferring it across a 10/100. [/font]

I'm using a 1 gigabit network, so that speed does help somewhat....

Actually, yes, I do have a Blu-Ray burner in both of my newer systems. But even 50gb doesn't go all that far any more with video. I do hope the Blu-Ray disks last longer than the regular DVD disks, however. I've got a batch of Sony blank DVDs that have basically self destructed just sitting on the shelf. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't write to them. Until I actually LOOKED at the writing surface, that is. You know, none of this digital media we are using is really *permanent*. I think media is going to have to go to RAID configurations in one fashion or another just to give us some peace of mind about keeping all our files recoverable. Fortunately hard drives have gotten cheap enough where using one or more drives solely to store checksum bits is feasible.

But when push comes to shove, I guess very little of what anyone captures using today's technology will be of much value compared to the technology likely 50 years from now anyway. Have you watched a VCR movie lately after getting used to Blu-Ray technology? It's actually retinally painful to watch....

I did not realize that HD videos were so large that 50GB would hardly make a dent. I have had several 500GB hard drives over the years that I have never filled up I could probably use one 25GB disk to store all the info on my hard drive that I keep when I do wipes. I guess I just don't keep much on my computers.

I have not owned a VCR in 10 years. I still have a few tapes of things I never found on DVD that I planned on transferring over that I haven't gotten around to.

I have a friend that has the entire series on Miami Vice on Beta Disk that he taped off of TV. They did not release it to DVD till a few years ago due to their being so much music they had to get the rights to.

Just remember, you want those adults out by Jan 2010 and it's already September. Plus, parents are starting to think about buying Christmas presents for their children so any saved funds, if not spent on snakes, will shortly be allocated elsewhere. My daughter's birthday is later this month and my son's in early January. I can feel the money starting to get warm in anticipation of starting to burn that hole in my pocket. You have the rest of your life to enjoy your retirement and the sooner you get rid of those snakes, the sooner you can start on truly enjoying it!

I'm with Susan on this!! I just got through the birthday season, have a little extra, but oh Christmas is coming. If I don't spend now its all going under the tree

Man, I hear what you all are saying, but unfortunately the world just won't stop for me so I can work on the price list exclusively. All I can do is the best that I can do, and that will just have to be enough. Or not. Certainly I am not going to get stressed out about it either way at this point.