Month: August 2018

This is not how I planned to spend my Sunday… I have plenty to keep me busy, but this is what I am up to right now.

But… In the spirit of saving money and knowing that our Carbonite subscription would be coming up soon, and realizing that their prices have gone up, while their coverage has gone down, I decided to see what else might be out there.

When we originally purchased Carbonite as our “cloud” backup years ago, the price wasn’t too bad, and though you could only backup one computer at a time, you could backup your phone(s), and that’s super important to me since we are on the go so much, and if we happened to lose or break our phone, we have tons and tons of pictures and videos of the family that we wouldn’t want to lose.

So while searching online I found another website (Idrive Online), with a better price, especially with the huge discount they give you on your first year, but even their annual price is going to be less than Carbonite, AND the awesome thing is you can backup as many computers and phones as you want. You are paying for the amount of storage, not just for a single machine that might only have a little bit to backup. (We ended up cancelling our iDrive online subscription because we found a ton of negative reviews. I’m not really sure how it rated so high on a seemingly reliable website.)

So… I decided we should switch, and went through the process of downloading our data off of Carbonite, so we could easily save it to the new website. It took days…. I mean like 4 or 5 days to download all the data. And now that I think about it, that’s probably why we got a notice from Xfinity saying that we had used 90% of our data for the month. Who knew that we had a data limit on our home internet… certainly not us. I mean, we know that we have a limit on our cell phones because we hit that 90% almost every month. The current cycle we managed to hit 75% usage within the first week…. thanks to our children who like to look at pictures on our phones and somehow magically manage to turn off our WiFi, so while we went about life as normal, we had no idea we were using data (my hubby listens to news radio every morning while he gets ready for work… and now he was doing it using our cell phone data plan). We made it through the cycle, since we got the notice like a day before our month was over, now we are still trying to make it through the last week on our cell phone plan and not go over.

So I decided to move the data from Carbonite onto my new laptop since it was packaged all pretty for me, and attempt to try to organize it, but didn’t get too far into the organization when I realized folders were completely empty. Like the ones from our honeymoon… and some other big trips we took so… I’m not really sure what Carbonite was doing, but I’m hoping the actual files still exist on our old laptop so that we haven’t lost them completely. And there were no files from any of my old cell phones.

So once I got the data downloaded, I installed the Idrive Online app onto my phone to start backing up my phone since I now realized Carbonite didn’t have anything backed up from my phone. I still wanted to organize the data on my laptop and try to delete duplicates between both laptops so I didn’t go over my data limit on my new backup program, but… I don’t have time for that just yet, so first priority would be my phone.

I started the backup yesterday morning before we were getting ready to head out to my grandmother’s memorial service, and all was going well. Then I realized it was draining my battery and fast. It backed up my contacts, and was working on backing up the 18k pictures I had saved to my SD card. I love my SD card, or so I thought I did, and as often as I can remember, I try to move my pictures from my phone onto my SD card, and more often, I do it when my phone is low on storage and it won’t let me install a new app or update an existing one. So, it had gotten to about 8k of the pictures and I saw that my phone had less than 40% battery remaining and we had to leave to the memorial service, so I cancelled the backup and cancelled the video backup. I was going to wait until I was back home, plugged in, and hooked back up to WiFi before I let it continue. We jumped in the superhero mobile and headed out to the service. My hubby was asking for directions but my phone was being as slow as molasses and draining even further. I had brought the cord so I plugged it in and tried to pull up Google Maps to get directions but it was taking FOOOOOOORRRRRRRREEEEEEEVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR to open, then when it finally did open, the keyboard wouldn’t open up. My hubby ended up using his phone to map it to the church, and before we got there I went to the handy section of my phone where I could change the performance and put it on the lowest performance. It actually worked too… the whole time we were at the service, I didn’t even pull my phone out of my purse, and hours later it had only used like 2% of the battery. I did get a text, and it wouldn’t let me response since I was on like major lockdown, but I was glad my phone was still alive. We came home, changed, then went back out again to have dinner with our family who had come to town for my grandma’s memorial service. Then we went to my parents house for the “after party” and my oldest daughter was taking pictures and videos, so I had no idea anything was wrong with my phone.

Until…

I decided to update her PurpleStride page to add a picture of her and my mother in love since we are planning to do the annual 5k we do in her honor to raise awareness and money for pancreatic cancer research. When I went to look for the Victoria folder in my gallery, it was nowhere to be found. So I opened the gallery directly instead of going from the website I was on, and sure enough, all my pictures and folders were gone. My heart dropped… I knew I had 18k pictures yesterday and today I had less than 100.

I tried going to the storage area of my phone and it said my SD card was corrupted. 🙁

I hooked my phone up to my computer because I read online that you may be able to save some of the data from your SD card if you hook it up to a computer, rather than just letting the phone format the card to start over. So before church I was able to move some of the folders, and after church I’ve sat here for hours moving more and more folders over. Thankfully, I still have a lot of my pictures. I don’t know what exactly I lost, but it seems like my video folders were completely empty (Snapchat, MSQRD) as well as a couple other folders I decided to move last since I knew they had a ton in them. I’m not sure if the things that are missing were actually already backed up to Idrive, but I did decide that if a picture was really important and special, I probably posted it to Facebook, so… there was comfort in knowing that much.

So, moral of the story. If you don’t backup your phone already, it’s probably a good idea to do so. And if you are going to do so… plan to do it when you have plenty of time to be home, maybe even overnight while you are sleeping so that you don’t run into the problem I did.

I’m still trying to organize the pictures on my computer before I even log into see what was already backed up. I feel like throwing everything into a single folder so I can see what is actually a duplicate so I don’t end up with the same picture multiple times, but… I haven’t actually decided how I’m going to tackle this. I may also be trying to minimalize in the process…. I had throwing things away, but if the picture is really just blurry, there is really just no point in keeping it, right?

I hope your Sunday is a lot more productive than mine.

One great thing about us forgetting our leftovers at my parent’s house last night was that we stopped by today after church to pick them up. And on the way, Victoria said she wanted spaghetti, and I had no meat thawed out, but I was going to have to figure something out. We got to my mom’s and she had leftover spaghetti from the other night when we didn’t make it over for dinner so…. Victoria got her spaghetti, I didn’t have to do any extra work, and it gave me more time to work on my phone.

Back to organizing now… wish me luck!

And as an update, since we used 50% of our Xfinity data for August as well, because it was backing up to Idrive before we figured out Idrive isn’t actually a good backup service (and probably why my phone lost my picture since their app crashed on my phone). So… I think we are going back our old faithful external storage, unless something amazing pops up for a decent price that actually works.