Life is always a series of adventures, some of which we would gladly avoid. There have been two incidents recently that fall into that category. PJ and I bought a wonderful Salvatore Grippi painting at auction but it turned out to be too big to mail and a delivery by truck would have cost a fortune. So Mike Bruce, my brother in law, and I drove to Ithaca, New York to collect the painting. Of course, the day we selected for the pickup coincided with a snowstorm. We went to the auction house for the painting and Mike and I began our journey back to Columbus, Ohio. The first five hours of the drive were icy and snowy and we had to be very careful of the conditions. As a result, we didn’t talk as much as we normally would. After lunch, though, conditions were better and we sped merrily on our way. Mike and I were still busy chatting at about 8:30 at night on the freeway, so much so that I wasn’t paying attention to the gauges. I ran out of gas!!!!!!
We ended up on the side of the highway in the dark with trucks roaring by. It was 15 degrees outside. We called AAA but they didn’t have anyone immediately available. We were disturbed to hear that it would be 45 minutes, but as that time stretched to and hour and a half, we still had no help. The battery on the car died and our flashers didn’t work. Mike had a flashlight app on his cell and we used that until the battery died there. We were now in the dark and very vulnerable to the speeding traffic – we were just a dark shape five feet from the outside lane of the highway. We called the State Police, but they didn’t arrive until we had been on the side of the road for over two hours. Finally, after two and a half hours, AAA came to our rescue. … two and a half hours!!!!! Poor Mike almost froze through; I’m well-padded so there was no problem for me.
The worst part of the whole adventure is that we were just 25 miles from Mike’s house. On a positive note, we now have flashlights, flares, and light sticks in each of our cars.
The second adventure did not involve physical danger, but was even more distressing. Our Via Lucis photo library consists of about 120,000 images stored on a Thecus NAS server with a RAID 10 array This provides us with redundant protection, but we have more. We also have a full online backup. Call me paranoid.
The files are organized and edited in Adobe Lightroom, a tremendous application which allows us full control over the images. The editing is non-destructive; there is no change to the original image, but the instruction sets for the images are stored and applied as needed. We also have complete metadata on every single image. This Lightroom library must be stored locally for each of us. PJ’s was stored on an external hard drive. Don’t worry, there’s a point to all of this.
We recently got new desktop systems, very nice iMacs with 32 GB RAM. We needed to transition from the old computers to the new quickly because we were traveling. I set up the computers as normal, with a new 4TB backup drive. But I did not notice that PJ’s partition on the backup drive was full and she did not pay attention to the notice that the backups were not happening. Of course we had a disaster. PJ had a disk crash on the external hard drive that contained her library files for all of her Via Lucis work. She lost the library files that contained all of the metadata and edits for 10 years worth of work.
Here is an image of the missing files! There were five; France, Spain, Italy, USA, and Iceland (?). I checked everywhere for copies but nothing remained.
Finally, we sent the disk in to a company that specializes in recovering data, and although it was expensive ($2000+), after a month we got word that everything was recovered. We got the disk back yesterday and can go back to work and start posting again! Suffice it to say that double redundancy is the order of the day now.