Encrypting Hard Drives, Purging Duplicated Files, Cloud Backup, and Blog Fixes

Good morning, kittens & dawgs! I took much of last month off from blogging. It wasn’t nearly as restful as I had planned. I had too many things on my plate to deal with to enjoy the time away.

One major thing we did was encrypt three external hard drives. This isn’t a two or three-hour job or even an all day job. This took us two weeks (maybe a little longer) to complete. Before encrypting each drive, we had to move files to a different HD and sometimes two because encrypting deletes everything on that drive. The good news is these drives are now more secure.

While DH took care of the encrypting process, I decided to set up a private Flickr account (you can get 1TB of free cloud storage if you have a Yahoo email account, which I created just for this purpose) to store my digital photos in the cloud. Having three extra physical devices to back my files to is great but HD can fail. We went down that path about five years ago and it was horrible to get things recovered.

Uploading photos to the cloud is slow going. That was a perfect time for me to purge duplicate files on my computer and external HD. Over the years, we got in a bad habit of keeping more than one copy, sometimes two or three copies of the same file. All we wanted to do was make sure to keep my files safe but doing this eats up storage and causes confusion. I got a good handle on my documents and photos but I’m sure I need to do another sweep to make sure I didn’t miss something.

The last thing I had going and still am in the midst of working through is my blog. I have a lot of broken links. My British blog buddy, Steve recommended an app called Broken Links. I’m still trying to figure it out but it is quite useful in pointing out links that need my attention and after all the repairs get done then this should be an excellent resource to keeping my blog in tip-top shape!

We only managed one trip to the mountains in all this mess. The colors were at their peak in the upper elevations and while they weren’t their best, it was still an awesome, amazing day. You’ll have to come by tomorrow to catch a peek on not-so Wordless Wednesday.

I’m joining Les from Ink Interrupted for Tuesday Coffee Chat this with this morning’s prompt: How do you handle your failures?  Are you a crawl back into bed and wait for it all to pass kinda person?  Or are you a jump immediately back on the horse sort? The way I handle failure depends on how well I’m handling other things in my life. Generally, I take screw ups pretty well. I just chalk it as a lesson learned that practice makes perfect, and I need to try, try, try again sort of mentality but sometimes a gloomy gray cloud hangs over my head. We’ve all been there like we are now with DH out of work. There are days I find I struggle with to keep from sinking and I hang on to God’s reassurance that He’s in control. I remind myself of other times when things were bleak and find gratitude in what we have. Although things aren’t comfortable right now, I know there are others in worse shape than us and so I pull myself out of my pity party, dust the seat of my britches off and climb back on the saddle. A person’s attitude can make or break you. I prefer to tackle my failures head on and make life better, instead of being defeated, weighted down, and depressed.

That’s a wrap for this morning. I hope you’ll play along in today’s Revolution #BoTB showdown. and follow along as I visit Stacy’s for Random Tuesday Thoughts. Don’t forget to return for a glimpse of our fall colors in tomorrow’s edition of not-so Wordless Wednesday.

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