Gathering Data Through Life

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Gathering Data Through Life

  • I like this discussion. Due to family circumstances, I won't go into, whenever I take any time off, it's always been a staycation, which I've gotten tired of. Both my wife and I want to travel but haven't been able to. Places we've never been but would like to go to, in no particular order:

    • Israel
    • England (including Scotland and Ireland)
    • Italy (I'm part Italian)
    • Japan

    Rod

  • Nice article! I have been lucky enough to have visited 8 of those cities. I look forward to expanding my list!

  • Good morning Steve and all of you.  This note today is so true in my own experience.  I guess I didn't realize exactly how much 'data' I had gathered until I embarked on the project of modernizing the media it is stored on.

    I lost my first wife to cancer when my two sons were in early grade school, then remarried and got two more.  While my early years didn't get to involve a wide range, the last 40+ years have allowed me to visit Alaska once, Hawaii twice, drive across western Europe once and cruise Europe west to east once on a once-in-a-lifetime Rhine-Danube cruise and then visit folks in Ukraine and Romania, visit Caribbean islands, along with building a remote cabin in the Rockies and spending summers there.

    Some awesome parts of the Rhine-Danube cruise were visiting some German prison camps, seeing many museums along the way, visiting fantastic old cathedrals and historic castles, numerous optional guided tours and evening lectures on the boat, besides traveling with a friend who is a descendant of  Admiral Karl Doenitz, Adolph Hitler's Naval Admiral.

    Of course there are thousands of photographic family memories, in addition to having ancestral family photos  covering over 100 years.  This in addition to an obsession with numbers that includes data for every cent of my retirement and records of income, expenses starting in 1986 and savings from  1943 onward.  Add to this over 1000 pages of ancestral data from both of my parents families.

    I 'blew' $1000 on a good 35mm automated slide scanner and have been scanning four moving boxes of slides and photo albums into digital media.  I've simplified my home office down to four computers but mass storage has increased to currently 28TB of NAS storage and four removables, and I'm only about 1/3 through the 35mm slides.  It is really nice to be able to browse through a century of memories on our 65" TV.

    One piece of advice to you all is to begin early the keep your data organized and safe, and to keep it in up-to-date media.  This makes it possible to share with family instead of having it all stored away in cardboard boxes and never seen.  Also, get all those memories documented, as it's nice to know who is in those 100-year-old photos.  And your kids will enjoy those pictures of their birthdays, friends, and family from their early days, maybe except for the 'nudies' of my oldest son getting a bath in a dishpan on the kitchen table.

    Definitely go with digital documents for your financial records and avoid accumulating years of paper files and the cabinets they consume.  I have slimmed down, scanned and shredded decades of paper files to the point that I have seven 4 and 5 drawer file cabinets in the basement that are empty of personal and business records.

    So start now to organize your data for the future.  You won't regret it.

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by  skeleton567. Reason: adding info

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • skeleton567, what do you use for your home NAS? I use OneDrive, which is great, but I'd like to supplement that with local storage. I used to have an external drive connected to my router, but that thing bit the dust a few years ago and I haven't gotten around to replacing it. When I do replace it I want to use a NAS system with at least 2 drives for redundancy.

    Rod

  • Interesting list of cities that spark some memories in the old databrain. I've got 14 visits and also memories of what could have been 11 more that were last minute changes due to world politics and the occasional skirmish we responded to during military service.

  • Only been to one on your List Honolulu, passed through Miami and Chicago, both flying and driving.

    Places we still want to see are:

    Italy, England, France, Spain, Australia, New Zeeland, the Maldives, Fiji, Bora Bora, and many more Caribbean Islands

    -------------------------------------------------------------
    we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
    Don't fear failure, fear regret.

  • Doctor Who 2 wrote:

    skeleton567, what do you use for your home NAS? I use OneDrive, which is great, but I'd like to supplement that with local storage. I used to have an external drive connected to my router, but that thing bit the dust a few years ago and I haven't gotten around to replacing it. When I do replace it I want to use a NAS system with at least 2 drives for redundancy.

    Rod, I sort of made a mistake on the first NAS device in that it turned out to be limited to 4 2TB disks.  It is a D-Link DNS-343 which is now discontinued anyway.  My second one is a Western Digital EX4100 which has a capacity of 4 10TB disks.  I guess the limitations are in the BIOS software for the devices.  Also, remember that there are various qualities of disk drive, and I use the higher-grade WD drives, something like 1 million hours MTBF.    Both devices have Ethernet ports to connect to my router, and also have USB ports for external drives.  I also use 4 removable USB drives for some backups.  When at my desk I use Ethernet for my network too.

    So far I'm really pleased with the EX4100, although the first-time setup required two one-hour phone calls with a support guy in India to get a non-RAID configuration going.  Their setup package is not real clear on that.

    Both devices have easy front-loading drive bays so instead of RAID I'll just insert a blank drive at times to do a disk-to-disk copy.  This can be time-consuming, and my first two copies from drive to drive took 14 hours each - digital pictures in TIF format with very large files.

    Incidentally, if you so desire, you can make the WD EX4100 available to external internet also, but I don't.

    Both devices can go into a sleep mode overnight.  This can cause a random inability to connect at first in the AM, but I think this is actually a WIN 10 problem so I just use batch files to simply disconnect and reconnect with DOS NETUSE commands.

    Hope this give you some perspective.  Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

     

     

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • 4 for me. I have barely traveled in my life! Wow.

    -- webrunner

    -------------------
    A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
    Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html

  • webrunner wrote:

    4 for me. I have barely traveled in my life! Wow. -- webrunner

    I hope that is because you are young and creating your career.  One of the benefits of getting older is being able to do more travel.  We probably did 80 percent of our travel when past age 50.  Before that we were maxing out our retirement in preparation.

    One of the best things I ever negotiated was my last position where I was required to go to no meetings, and got to take unlimited unpaid time off to travel and relax.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • Hey Steve,

    Great article.

    I'm up to 12 so far from your list: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Rome, Los Angles, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Glasgow, Miami, Honolulu.

    Plus a few that are not on your list: Venice, Pisa, Monte Carlo, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Dublin, Cork, Liverpool, Edenborough.

     

  • I have only hit 8 so far. It would have been 10 but the Pandemic canceled 2 planned trips. Hoping to remedy that soon!

  • D Gillespie wrote:

    Hey Steve,

    Great article.

    I'm up to 12 so far from your list: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Rome, Los Angles, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Glasgow, Miami, Honolulu.

    Plus a few that are not on your list: Venice, Pisa, Monte Carlo, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Dublin, Cork, Liverpool, Edenborough.

    WooHoo! I've been to Frankfurt. 🙂

    Rod

  • Here is another approach to travel that we have tried in several locations, such as Hawaii, Alaska, and driving across Europe.

    In order to get a real feel for the places, sometimes avoid the metropolitan locations and tourist traps and get out to where the real local folks carry on their lives.  From the backroads in Hawaii like the road to Hanna, the local towns in Germany where folks were gathered in the local pubs, to the small Alaskan towns along the pipeline route and the fishing towns along the coast where the Alaskan cod sandwiches were fantastic and the locals still do their communal seal hunts.  Even off the main routes in Europe, we could always find locals who knew enough English to help us with ordering meals and finding comfortable local lodging other than the chains.

     

     

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • Thank you very much, @skeleton567, your NAS information is great!!

    Rod

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