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gurtch

Well-known member
Hello all: I am posting this on three forums: Sony Forum, Medium Format Forum and Fuji Forum, as I visit and post to all three. I have been off line for quite a while. We use our spare bedroom as my "office" where I do all my photo editing and printing. My tower style PC sits next to a window. We live on a barrier island off the coast of southern NJ. When it rains here, we often get flooding, and the rains comes sideways because of the high winds. Several weeks ago I forgot to close the bedroom window and it rained in, soaking the back of my PC. I finally got it back yesterday....it seems it only needed a new power supply. I had three small USB 3.0 external drives on the table next to the PC which also got wet, but fortunately they still work (that is where I keep my photo files). When my PC repair guy returned my PC he said Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, will not be supported any longer, and I will probably have to migrate to Windows 10, sooner or later. This scares me: I have Photoshop CS6, and hundreds of dollars invested in Plug Ins, Actions, and filters, as well as a ton of stand alone graphics programs, all compatible with Windows 7. Also, most were down loaded, so I have no discs, only pass words and keys, which I would have to scrounge around to find them. Also my web site on my PC now is giving me grief, I need to figure that out. Today I am getting two USB 3.0 1 Terabyte external drives with the goal of weekly backing up my two internal drives: C:\ and D:\. I certainly missed you folks!
Dave Gurtcheff
Beach Haven, NJ USA
MODERN PICTORIALS
 

Shashin

Well-known member
Welcome back, Dave.

I am getting to the same place were I will need to upgrade my OS and lose a lot of applications. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with my machine.

Have you ever thought about moving out of your flood zone...
 

biglouis

Well-known member
I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my W7 Pro to W10 Pro. In fact, I bought the W10 Home upgrade but when it was complete I discovered I had been upgraded to W10 Pro. I figure MS must have decided that as I was a legal owner of W7 Pro I was entitled to W10 Pro (which has one important benefit which is scheduling of updates).

Now, I have been an MS user since the were a chicken-shack software company in Albuquerque NM (I kid you not) and mostly they have dumped all over most PCs I have owned (like DOS 5, which did not work out the box and you had to buy the upgrade to 5.1 to make it work - talk about anti competitive practices!).

So, I anticipated the absolute worst and had incredibly low expectations of the upgrade but like you I got to a point where one of my applications (not photography related) would only upgrade if I was running W10.

The biggest surprise was that the universe did not fall apart. The upgrade took less than an hour (from memory, I think it was about 30 minutes) and stone me, what came up afterwards was my exact same W7 desktop complete with background picture and all my icons. I was incredibly surprised, and of course delighted.

Now, I am no friend to MS. They are a vendor of mostly mediocre software and I speak as a former IT Director who had to deal with a lot of MS-related problems in my career. But respect where it is due, this upgrade did work for me.

For information, I have a Western Digital low cost NAS drive with 6TB (2x 6TB) storage in a RAID configuration attached to my small home network With such a device I know I will never lose my backup.

Except!

In addition every couple of months I dump my photos to an external drive which I give to my son to keep at his house, so that if my house burns down - or someone breaks in and steals my PC and NAS drive - I won't lose my primary storage and local backup. (This is based on the offsite IT storage principle that lightening does not strike simultaneously in two different places, so the copy stored offsite will prevail).

I am looking forward to low cost cloud storage. I need about 4TB at a reasonably low cost, say $10 a month. When that appears I will use that so have if backup and offsite backup combined - and if I chose a company in the US (I am based in the UK) I'll even have the highest principle of offsite storage which is continental separation of primary and secondary storage of data (a bit over the top for a home use but you never know when a tsunami or earthquake might hit London!).

Hope my ramblings have given you confidence to consider W10. I should have added - it is not half-bad (as we say in traditional British understatement) which was another surprise to me.

BTW, if you have Adobe products you should have an Adobe online account where you can find all the passwords to your products. I too, no longer have discs etc. But I also pay $10 a month for Creative Suite. When I upgrade to W7 I think my copy of CS no longer worked and I decided I would go the subscription route. I own my Lightroom but I seem to get free upgrades for the moment. Now and then the $10 a month rankles but it is a lot less than film and processing so I sort-of look on it as the cost of my hobby, for the present.

LouisB
 

pegelli

Well-known member
I am looking forward to low cost cloud storage. I need about 4TB at a reasonably low cost, say $10 a month. When that appears I will use that so have if backup and offsite backup combined - and if I chose a company in the US (I am based in the UK) I'll even have the highest principle of offsite storage which is continental separation of primary and secondary storage of data (a bit over the top for a home use but you never know when a tsunami or earthquake might hit London!).
Louis (and others), for this take a look at Backblaze, it's about half that cost (a bit depending wether you go monthly, yearly or 2-yearly) for unlimited backup storage. Getting all your files there might take a week or two but once there it will look at your computer and make backups of any new or modified file (many schedule options). Only thing to note is that it is off-site backup, not off-site storage. Once you delete a file from your home drives it's gone from the off-site backup after 30 days. For file restores you can either download, or after a catastrophic event buy a hard drive from them that they will fill with all your backed-up data and then send to you by courier.
 
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biglouis

Well-known member
Louis (and others), for this take a look at Backblaze, it's about half that cost (a bit depending wether you go monthly, yearly or 2-yearly) for unlimited backup storage. Getting all your files there might take a week or two but once there it will look at your computer and make backups of any new or modified file (many schedule options). Only thing to note is that it is off-site backup, not offsite storage. Once you delete a file from your home drives it's gone from the off-line backup after 30 days. For file restores you can either download, or after a catastrophic event buy a hard drive from them that they will fill with all your backed-up data and then send to you by courier.
That looks really good. Especially for $60/year. Thanks for letting me know.

LouisB
 

Thorkil

Well-known member
I have always had Windows computers only. I have just had that silly thing that my opinion of Apple was that it just was a heavy monopoly that I didn't wanted to support.
For the same reason I drove first the old danish motorbike Nimbus and the British motorbikes Norton, while everyone changed to modern Japanese bikes, I just stayed totally loyal to the old british bikes - thats just me.
I have always updated to the latest windows (and I must admit I check for updates every morning when I start, and every afternoon too, thats just me. Also on my two laptops, at least I update every second or third day. As security I has always used Norton internet security, and I update and scan every day, and use Ccleaner to delete all useless internet files several times a day. Have never got any virus on the computer, but I got it on my online mailserversystem, where Norton in a period deleted several attacks every day. I run the office-programs from Microsoft on subscription, so it will be updated together with Windows at same time
In my stationary computer from 2015, I have a 256Bb SSD for progarms a 3Tb Seagate for storage. I have now installed 2 extra Seagate 6Tb HDD Barracuda Pro inside the stationary-tower, and have a new 4Tb Seagate Barracuda Pro HDD ready to install when I get home from Italy, this one shall be the main storage instead of the old 3Tb (after 4 years of running often around 12 hours a day, its more secure to change it I think - and remember to buy Pro series, they are really that much tougher). And the one 6Tb shall be extra storage (while the Z7 files are huge), and the second 6Tb solely for backup. I have divided them in partition drives at each 1Tb (just did it in the very reliable disk management in Windows where you also rename the drives afterwards with content), to keep up speed, but it gives a hell of a lot of drives to look at.
Documents for work I also store at dropbox
Then I have 5 8Tb external drives for backup, so I'm covered.
But Louis you a right, one should get a banc-safe to store a 8TB (wont dare bothering our son and daughters with that - they would get really annoyed), and shift this one with another fresh copied 8Tb once in every 1 or 2 month, if something happens with the house (even though the best system is a 3xHDD exchange system, so there will be at least one HDD covering 2 periods in the banc, if you by chance is doing a foolish thing on the latest copy).
While its important for me to store everything for my work too, at least 5 years after finishing a job. Else I can run into a severe responsibility problems.
Perhaps I should contact my banc at once when I get home.
 
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gurtch

Well-known member
Several people said I would need a rather fast machine to migrate to Windows 10. I have a Puget Systems PC made in May 2011. It has:

Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core 3.3GHz 95W processor
16MB Kingston DDR3 RAM
XFX RadeonHD 5750 1GB Video Card
Antec TruePower 650W power supply
Two hard drives: 500MB for operating system and programs, 1 TB for files
Give that it is now 8 years old, by computer standards, it is probably rather old, but performs everything I need well.
Thanks again
Dave
 

biglouis

Well-known member
Dave

I think the specs of your PC are fine. I bought a laptop last year which was an i5 with 8gb of memory which had W10 home pre-configured and in fact now I come to think of it, I was so surprised at how fast it was compared to my i7 desktop that it began to convince me to change over on my desktop.

I never used my Nik Effex plugins in CS but they continue to function as add-ins in Lightroom after the conversion, if that helps.

LouisB
 

Thorkil

Well-known member
Several people said I would need a rather fast machine to migrate to Windows 10. I have a Puget Systems PC made in May 2011. It has:

Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core 3.3GHz 95W processor
16MB Kingston DDR3 RAM
XFX RadeonHD 5750 1GB Video Card
Antec TruePower 650W power supply
Two hard drives: 500MB for operating system and programs, 1 TB for files
Give that it is now 8 years old, by computer standards, it is probably rather old, but performs everything I need well.
Thanks again
Dave
As Louis said it just looks fine.
Mine stationary is i5-6600 3,9GHz Quad, and its fast enough.
Also "just" 16Gb, and everything is still fast enough for me.
The Windows 10 is not that consuming I think.
Reading in some 100-200 pictures in C1pro12.1 takes some minutes for the hardware accelerator in C1 to tune in, but you can still even though begin to work on them.
I would recommend a 4, 6 or 8Tb external Seagate Barracude Pro HDD just for USB 3 connection as security back up for your files. Then there is enough space for several complete files-backup.
Only extra secure people need a system-backup, as a "mirror-copy" of your System-HDD or SSD. But then you have to have an extra HDD or just a USB-key of sufficient size reserved only for that system-backup (and mark it carefully).
thorkil
 
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