Technical Difficulties

About a month ago, my external Buffalo hard-drive failed. Just completely toast. As a result of that, I’ve lost some of my raw images. How many? I just don’t know.

To solve the issue, I bought a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo plus 2 Seagate Barracuda drives, each at 1.5 terrabytes in size. The NetGear just sits on the network, acting as a file server (and torrent client). You connect to it just like anything else on the network, and it sits there, keeping things safe. It’s got built-in RAID support, too, so if you feed it 2 hard-drives, it will clone the information, so that if a drive goes bad you don’t lose anything.

This morning, one of the new hard-drives crashed.

It’s being returned to Amazon, and we can only hope that the replacement is NOT sent via Royal Mail: it took us 4 days to get the drives in the first place, because of Royal Mail’s strike. Even then, I had to hire a car to go down to the postal depot.

Friday I finally got around to replacing the Router with an off-brand, rather than relying on BT. This cost £40 and will save us no end of trauma. British Telecom, you see, doesn’t seem to like people who share files via a Torrent client – even though it is legal for us to do so (see Azeureus for some discussion on the matter). BT doesn’t come right out there and shut you down, though. No – that would subject them to criticism, discussion, and what have you.

What they do is to provide you with a router. Then, every time they decide to free up some resources, well, they update the firmware of your router. This means that the router stops responding, and you have to power-cycle it. If it’s happened when you’re not around, they’ve freed up some resources, and your downloading stops happening until you notice. They updated our router’s firmware 3 times in a single day, last week!

Of course, none of this is documented anywhere, but I’ve spoken with BT about this around 5 times now. Each time I mention what’s logged at the router, they get all strange, shuffle me off to somebody else, and end up disconnecting the call. So, we’re not playing their game any more.

Add all of these things to the laptop failure (it’s back now, and better than it’s been in years), and I’m about ready to say to the world: Technology. You’re Doing It Wrong. Technology items as disposable objects is simply insane. We, as users, ought to be able to rely on the technology to continue, to be durable. Instead, we are forced to “upgrade” our items, shelling out money and time, losing our work as we go along. It really is quite a sham. Technology companies: stop being so evil!

P.S. – if you’re planning to send us anything via the postal mail, please reconsider: the Royal Mail is so far behind that if you send it now, it’ll maybe get to us by Christmas!

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