Yet another camera issue. As least this time it’s not the cameras fault! Our camera is equipped with two 40 gigabyte memory cards. It’s possible to configure the camera to write to one and, when it’s full, write to the other but since 40 gigs represents a lot of pictures, we have it configured so that pictures get written to both cards at the same time. It’s a fail safe thing. In case one card dies (it’s rather rare but these cards can fail) the pictures will be safeguarded on the other. This is just one of the many redundancies we have come up with to prevent us from ever losing a photo.
At the end of every day we download the pictures from the camera to our computer which then uploads them to the cloud. Now we have three copies of every photo, one on the camera, one of the computer and one in the cloud. Once the cloud is updated we erase the memory cards and start all over. Even we think two copies should be enough. Besides, someday we’ll run out of space on the memory cards.
Well, in the one and half since we retired this system has worked well. The pictures are actually stored on an computer using an external drive and that drive failed when we were in Budapest. No problem. The pictures were stored in the cloud. We bought a new drive, sync’ed with the cloud and everything was back to normal. Sometimes technology is more than just a pain in the ass; sometimes is actually works exactly the way it’s supposed to. It would be great if we had more days like that.
Enter Greece. Everywhere you go in Greece they still use DSL for Internet access. Never heard of DSL? That’s not surprising. We used it in the United States for just a couple of years until they started rolling out much better technologies. What’s wrong with DSL? A few things. The first is that it’s really not a high speed technology. It can’t come close to the bandwidth that most people get out of their cable modems. Also, it’s normally configured to be asymmetrical which means that you get decent download speeds and really lousy upload speeds. That’s fine for most applications because most people really don’t upload that much data but in our case, when we’re literally uploading hundreds of photographs a day, it’s an issue (even a few hundred photos might not seem like a problem but we take high resolution photos in “raw” format so each photograph is about 25 megs in size; the photos from a typical camera phone are normally just two or three megs in size). Our uploads to the cloud have gotten further and further behind. Right now we’re still waiting for more than 4,000 photos to upload.
The problem came to a head when we made our first visit to the archeological museum in Athens. The camera’s memory cards filled up and we couldn’t take any more pictures. This is the first time this has ever happened in the nine years since we’ve owned this camera. So, what did we do? We took one memory card out, wiped the second one and used it for the ongoing photos. Now we’re saving our photos to only one memory card. One level of redundancy is now gone. Hopefully we won’t live to regret that decision.
A few weeks have passed and now the second card is nearly full. You might think that we could just wipe the first card and continue swapping but it’s not that simple. Apple doesn’t upload photos in the order that you take them. It uploads them in a somewhat random order so it’s nearly impossible to say if it’s truly safe to wipe the the first card. Our solution was to buy a third card. We’ll be carrying it around to use when the second card is completely filled. We’ve considered spending an afternoon at an Internet cafe and using it’s high-speed bandwidth to solve our problem but since we left Athens we’ve been moving around so much that we really don’t have that kind of time.
Maybe we should stop taking so many pictures? That’s never going to happen even if we have to buy a fourth memory card. Since we’ve retired we’ve taken 14,581 photos and we’re taking even more every day. We plan to stop for a week in either London or Paris on our way back to the U.S. in March at which time we’d expect to get better Internet service and, at least this problem, will resolve itself. Hopefully things will go well until then. Wish us luck!