It is silly to feel as despondent as I do. Especially since I am as fortunate as I am — my family is healthy and happy and provided for, we have all we need, and we even got to go to a fantastic event like the California Strawberry Festival. But I am despondent. Why? Because I lost my photos.
Again, I know it’s silly. I should be able to forget about it. But it’s difficult. We don’t get out to big events all that often and to lose the pictures…ugh. Because I love taking photos and I love looking back on the things I’ve done and on the people I love via my photos.
It turned out my uploads to my Mac had been coming back with errors since last weekend, but I hadn’t thought anything of it. And, basically, all my efforts to keep my storage usage down on my phone finally bit me in the butt — and I lost photos. The photos I’d taken from last weekend had somehow been backed up to Trinity’s phone, so that was lucky — but because I just took the photos yesterday, there apparently hadn’t been time for my photos to magically back up to Trin’s phone. I also lost all the photos I’d taken during the week, but those were less critical.
(This is all after we ended up losing track of our time and money at the festival. I kind of wish we hadn’t let the boys get their faces painted, partly because it felt like a sort of wasted $10, but mostly because it was such a time suck — we waited an hour to get it done! Then it took forever to get food because the lines were insane, and then we spent $41 on chicken skewers, fish tacos and a fish/catfish and chips platter and chili fries. Oh, fair food. After the rides, the smoothies, the face painting and the food, there was not much left for dessert or strawberries to take home. 😞
I’ve already told Trinity that if we can go again, we are going early, eating our faves only (smoothies, key lime calamari, garlic fries and strawberry desserts), doing a few rides and leaving to get In-N-Out for lunch.)
Anyway. I did get some photos uploaded to a shared iCloud account before trying to download them to my computer, so I at least have those photos.
I had been planning to upload more but those are gone.
This has also lit a fire under my efforts to fix my computer, which I believe is the source of the errors keeping my photos from downloading. And while these issues persist, I am re-enabling my Photostream. 😒
I know. Such first-world issues, but still a problem nonetheless.
Darleene, I’m no fan of iCloud (or whatever they call that thing that supposedly backs up your iOS device). I guess it’s enabled by default, but even though it doesn’t back up your photos by default (as if it had another reason to exist), it does back up an image of the entire phone somewhere, somehow. I never figured it out. Now I do “real” backups — I pull the images from the iPod Touch and put them on the computer and do the backup from there.
The whole iCloud thing seemed like a come-on to buy storage with a poor user interface from Apple when others (Microsoft, Google) offer a lot more free and, for me, Dropbox checks a lot more, um, boxes, as they say.
I also meant to say that although I haven’t made the leap yet, I think one of the necessities in our increasingly digital lives is full, redundant backup, and we should all be paying for something like Dropbox’s 1 TB of storage for $100 a year, or the equivalent from Apple, Google, Microsoft or whatever provider offers good backup tools for your devices.
Yeah, I’m no fan of iCloud Drive either after reading this article from Lifehacker. Glad I didn’t either, since my iMac is older than my firstborn and not up to date! I think having Photostream will be enough of a photo backup, until I can download photos to the computer after each time I shoot a bunch, such as at the Strawberry Festival. My cloud drive space is currently a patchwork system between DropBox, Google and OneDrive.
When I finally receive my tax refund (we had issues), I was planning to invest in another external hard drive, and many of them now include a year of cloud drive service. At that time, I’ll see how I like it, but I’m still very wary of the security and reliability of cloud drive storage.
key lime calamari??? what is this thing???
i’m sorry to hear about the photos.
Yeah, its DELICIOUS. The same vendor has garlic fries that you can also get crab on top of. I usually don’t opt for the crab, because I don’t like everyone’s crab, youknowhatimsaying?
At least losing the pictures made me buckle down to backup my computer and update the OS, which led to repairing the Photos library. Sigh.