Computer Woes Explained

Everyone,

So I think I am finally back and running with my lapple. Of course, it took almost 5 hours at the apple store to get it fixed. Wanna know the problem? My hard drive was so full it didn't have enough memory to boot. Wow. I learned a lot about my apple at the store with Genius Mike (whom I spent his entire shift with). Did you know that apples make copies of files when you move them in case they get corrupted with the move? I didn't. Which proved to be my downfall.

I have over 7,000 pictures on my computer. That's not counting the home movies I've taken of the kids too. I took these pictures from the time I got my camera (Christmas 2007) till now. Last week when my lapple died, it crashed because of something iphoto did. And then when I opened iphoto again, my pictures were gone. I was on the phone with my mom at the time and she can tell you I freaked out just a little bit. That's a lot of history to be completely gone! Good thing my dad was able to talk me back from the ledge and helped me find all my pictures. Good, good.

I then tried to put my pictures back in iphoto. It crashed again. Again, no pictures were there. Again, I tried to put them in there, and another crash. This time it crashed hard and I couldn't get it to start. Genius Mike ended up starting it from his portable hard drive and we found out there was no space on my hard drive. I had to buy another portable hard drive and back up my music and erase it. I erased all of my movies (that I own in hard copy). I erased all of my downloaded stuff (not sad about that one, really.) and there still wasn't enough space to reinstall my operating system. We tried to back up my pictures to erase those but it would have taken 4 hours to do. Ouch.

We finally were able to get it going, and he warned me it would be very slow until I moved some stuff off of my hard drive. Once I got it up and running (about 5 times the normal speed) I decided to start with my pictures and get them backed up as soon as possible.

Did you know that apple saves things as you move them around? I just said that right? Well, I had no less than 9 copies of EACH PICTURE. Meaning I had around 63,000 pictures on my hard drive. Now I wonder where all my space went!

Juice and I have been taking turns going through each picture one by one and deleting all the copies. If there's an easier way, please let me know! We are only up to picture 105. Most pictures had 14-18 copies. Once I got through about 75 pictures had had over 3,000 files deleted, suddenly my lapple starts running the way it should.

I'm going to try and be better about writing since I seem to be out of the habit but if you don't hear from me, I'm buried under all my thousands and thousands of pictures. At least this way they are getting super organized. Just in time for me to get going on scrap booking again! (Lolli, you up for at least getting what you've got done?!) These poor boys don't have baby books yet and I want to get those started and the first year done at least.

Picture 106, me looking very pregnant and sick but showing off my belly and trying to be happy. March of 2008, because that's what the calendar behind me says. So I was about a month away from delivery. I was going to put the picture up for you guys to see but I really really don't want to. See here for a picture near that time.

Juice just calculated out how long this should take me to delete all the duplicates. Plus or minus 60 hours. Or 60 days if I do it for an hour a day. 2 months! Yay! So I should have it done by Halloween at least. Lucky me.

Safire