When I quilt, I frequently take pictures or video of the steps, which can be shared in my classes, quilt alongs or patterns. The easiest way for me to do this is to take them on my phone, upload them to Dropbox and access then from my computer. This has worked well for quite until a few days ago….
Recently, I started working on a newer, faster computer. I love it! The bigger screen makes designing so much easier – but I digress. When migrating to the new machine, we used a software to transfer all the files – easy peasy. Except, a few files were missing, which I didn’t notice until I went to use them.
The first was my Adobe printer. This one was easy to fix. I chatted with Adobe, they unistalled and reinstalled the software and voila – my printer was back!
The second was my EQ8 software gave me an error that some files were missing. Hmmm. I went online and followed Electric Quilt’s instruction for diagnosing the issue. The software was looking for files that weren’t in My Documents. Strange… I could see them there. First, I moved the project and image files to another folder. Then, I uninstalled and reinstalled the software. Moved the files back to the My EQ8 folder and all was right with the world.
The third was my Dropbox folder had disappeared. My husband fixed this one. He uploaded the new version of Dropbox Professional (Dropbox S doesn’t allow you to access files offline, which I need to do as our internet isn’t terribly reliable). That was pretty painless.
Then, came the pain….. I plugged in my external drive, which I use to backup all of my files, except those pesky camera uploads I started telling you about in this story. I trust the cloud, a little, so I prefer to control my backups locally. When I plugged it in, Dropbox started going into overdrive. It told me it was uploading pictures and it would take about 8 hours for over 30,000 images! What the…..I tried to eject the drive – no can do. I tried to stop the sync – no can do. I grabbed my husband the computer whiz. He took one look and said – call Dropbox, this is their issue.
Theo from Dropbox was a great help. He diagnosed the first part of the problem easily. The new version of Dropbox defaults to capturing all of your files of a certain type. So when we selected photos and videos – it took the from everywhere – photos, stock images, fabric swatches from EQ8, recipe files, icons for apps – everything! He was able to change that pretty quickly on my computer so it only grabbed them from the photos folder of my computer.
Of course, that didn’t stop the massive download, because Dropbox was backing up my backup! He helped me through that as well. He safely stopped it in its tracks and reconfigured the setting so it would not back-up my backup. Unfortunately, when it pulled all those photos from my backup, it dumped all of them into one folder – my camera uploads, which I rely upon for design work. Theo assured me if Dropbox copied the files, I could just delete them. If not, Dropbox moved them, I would need to move them back. The good news was that it only copied them. The bad news was that I now had 30k photos to sort through because my original camera uploads only existed there and on my phone. So I couldn’t do a complete delete counting on the photos all being on my local backup. Cleaning up this mess will take a lot of time and a lot of wine. The bright side is that I didn’t lose anything and I will finally organize the photos….
Lesson learned – first read reviews on new software versions. This massive file grab issues has its own forum on the internet because so many people were frustrated with it. Second, check all of your applications, not just your files when you migrate to a new computer. Third, I need to copy my camera uploads to my backup so that I don’t rely solely on Dropbox.
Thank you for letting me vent about my computer woes…. I really can’t complain too much. I have an awesome computer and all of my files survived – if a little messy. Kind of like my sewing studio….
Happy Quilting 🙂
Laureen