I’m having hard drive trouble. Specifically an almost completely full 5TB drive is starting to crap out on me. I’ve got enough space on my other drives that I can transfer it all over to, but it is going to take time. The trouble is that this faulty drive keeps disconnecting itself. This means I cannot transfer it all over at once, but I have to move files in smallish batches. Right now I’m managing about 5-10 gigs at a time. But when you have to transfer 4.5 TBs that’s a lot of transferring. Especially since I basically have to sit at my desk and watch it so I can move to the next batch.

I know, I know, I should have it all backed up. But I’ve got over 10TBs of files and I can’t really afford to buy another 10 TBs of storage just for backup. As I write this I realize I have money in my PayPal account that you all have generously donated so I’ll use some of that to buy me a couple of new drives to store everything and to back it up.

But that doesn’t solve the current problem. If the drive doesn’t completely crap out on me it will still take me several days to get everything transferred to my current drives. Then when the new ones come in I’ll want to take some time to transfer everything over there and get things organized. Then I’ll want to get my backup drive in order.

If my drive does crap out before I get it all transferred, I honestly don’t know what I’m gonna do. So cross your fingers. And please be patient.

Sorry to be taking a break so soon after starting this new site, but I’ve got to get this fixed ASAP. I will not be doing any new blogging on this during this time.

I spent the last few days doing a whole lot of downloading. Too much, actually. My ISP only gives me 1 TB of bandwidth per month before they charge me extra (and they are already charging me way too much). Normally I come close to hitting it, but manage to stay under it. Because I downloaded too much stuff this week my normal activities will probably drive me over that limit, so I’m gonna slow things down for a few days in terms of what I upload.

But I’m still going to be posting quite a bit. I’m finding that I really like posting each shows info. Doing the daily posts where I linked to whatever I had uploaded on my Amazon Drive saved me a lot of time, but it somehow felt lacking. Now that I’m back to posting the shows individually (and then adding them once again to the artists pages – something I really love) I’m gonna spend some time going back through those old Shows of the Day posts and individual post the info to each show if that makes sense.

So you’ll be seeing a lot of new posts that are actually just posting the info to shows I’ve already shared via the Amazon Drive. I hope you all like seeing the individual show info as much as I enjoy putting them out there.

Is it weird that I really enjoy the administration part of this hobby? Like there is something soothing about organizing my collection and filling in missing shows, and putting everything into a spreadsheet.

Donation link removed – I received more than enough money to upgrade the subscription. Thank you.

I’m just under 100 gigs shy of my 5TB limit on the Amazon Drive which means it is either time to upgrade or come up with a different solution. Before you donate I do want to go over the other options. But first here are some more details.

To bump the drive up to 6TB it will cost $359.94. The last time I begged you all for money you gave very generously, enough for me to have upgraded the drive twice and I still have $263.40 left in the coffer. So I really need less then $100 to renew.

I last begged in June of 2020. I upgraded to the 4TB plan at that time. Then I upgraded to 5TB in December of 2020. Up until now I had been upgrading about every six months. This time it has only been a little over four months. There are a few reasons for this but it basically boils down to me taking the time I’m saving not doing individual posts for each show and spending it uploading more shows, and being more of a completist which means more sources for each show for several artists.

If we assume that I will continue uploading at a similar rate (which is not necessarily true, but lets keep the assumption for now) then every 4-6 months I’ll need to bump up another TB on the Amazon Drive. Interestingly, Amazon goes up 1 TB in their plans up until 10TB then they jump up to 20 TB then 30 TB and that seems to be the highest level they offer. So if everything continues at its current rate we’ll have to have some different conversations about whether or not to stay with Amazon or what. But we’ve got time for that on another day. Mainly I say this to keep you informed and thinking about the future.

My 5TB plan is good for a year so it will not renew until December of this year. I could literally do nothing and I could stay where I’m at for another seven months.

Which brings me to the other options. If you all want to save money I could keep it at 5TB and either just let you all dig through my archives for a few months or I could delete some shows and rotate in new ones periodically. Ideas for that range from deleting the oldest files on the drive, or maybe deleting some less popular artists, or I could delete some of the multiple sources. I’d need help with all of that so I’d probably let you all vote on which things I should delete. I think I would make a list of what I’d deleted so new folks could make requests to reupload old things.

Anyway, at a guess I’d say you all will donate for more storage so I won’t get into the details of what else we could do until I need to.

Thanks as always for being such a great community.

About three weeks ago I spilled a big glass of sweet tea all over my desk. It soaked a whole bunch of work papers and fell a little onto my keyboard. Exactly one week later I did the exact same thing. This time the keyboard got soaked. It was a wireless Bluetooth keyboard and as such, I didn’t have much luck cleaning it. Within a day the keys were sticking together making it nearly impossible to type with any efficiency.

Luckily I had an old wired keyboard laying around and I was able to plug it in and make good use of it. Then a couple of days ago I restarted my computer and suddenly the keyboard wouldn’t work. The computer wouldn’t recognize it no matter what I did. I purchased a new keyboard which should arrive in a couple of days. For now I am borrowing my wife’s keyboard.

The point of this dumb story is that over the weekend I was keyboardless and thus I didn’t do any blogging.