A follow-up to my review of Google’s Backup and Sync

I reviewed Google’s Backup and Sync service back in December. There were several issues with the service that I outlined in there, such as the app backing up files that it was not supposed to back up, the service counting files toward the quota even though it was supposed to compress them and allow unlimited free storage, etc. I thought I’d do a follow-up because, as you may have guessed already, there are more issues I want to point out and also a few pieces of advice that might help you in your use of the app.

One issue that occurs over and over is that the app crashes. It gives an error message popup and says it needs to quit. Which is somewhat okay, but when you start it back up, it does a re-check of all the files it’s supposed to back up, and that is an energy-hungry process. You can see it at the top of the active apps in Activity Monitor (on the Mac), eating up all the processor cycles as it iterates through its list of files. And even when it does its regular backup in the background, it’s still climbing toward the top of the active apps. To be fair, Flickr’s own Uploadr is also an energy-hungry app. Neither of the apps allow you to make them use less energy (to work slower, etc.), so they churn away at your computer’s resources even though they’re supposed to work quietly in the background.

Another issue that still occurs is that the app backs up files that it’s not supposed to back up. I have it set to back up only photos and videos and yet it backs up a lot of files with strange extensions that end up counting toward my storage quota on Google Drive. Have a look at the screenshots taken from my settings for the app below.

I had it set on backing up RAW files too, but it wasn’t backing up anything but CR2 (Canon RAW files) and DNG (Adobe RAW files, or digital negatives). And it had problems backing those up as well, because when the size of a DNG file was over a certain limit (it’s somewhere around 50 MB I think), it backed it up but it didn’t compress it, so it counted toward the storage quota.

It wasn’t compressing ORF (Olympus Raw files) while backing them up, so they counted toward my quota. Since I shoot only with Olympus gear these days, that was no good to me. So what I did is I chose not to let it back up any RAW files and I set my camera to shoot in ORF + JPG format. I work with the ORF files in Lightroom and the unedited JPG files get backed up with the app.

Here’s a list of files whose extensions it might be helpful for you to add to its settings, so the app won’t put them on your Google Drive. Of course, as mentioned above, the app backs up all sorts of files it’s not set to back up. It’s like it ignores the settings and just does what it wants, so ymmv.

cmap
data
db
db-wal
graphdb
graphdb-shm
graphdb-wal
heic
heif
ithmb
lij
lisj
orf
plist
psd
skindex
tif
tmp
xmp
zip

You may have noticed HEIF and HEIC in the list above. Those are the new image and video standards used by Apple because they offer much higher quality and compression than JPG and H.264. And even though it’s not logical that Google wouldn’t know or want to compress them and back them up properly, they don’t. The app will simply copy them to Google Drive, uncompressed, and they’ll count toward your quota. So all of you who have iPhones and iPads and use the Backup and Sync app or the Google Photos app, you are currently backing up the photos taken with your devices on Google Drive, but they count toward your storage quota even if you don’t want them to. Keep in mind that this may be a temporary thing and Google may choose to rectify this issue in the coming months.

The storage options on Google Drive are another issue I want to talk about. I had to upgrade my storage to 1 TB because of all these issues. At one point, I had over 400GB of unexplained files taking up space in there and I had to upgrade to the 1 TB plan, which costs $10/month. Now I don’t know about you, but that pisses me off. It’s one thing if I choose to upgrade my storage plan because I want to do it, and it’s another thing altogether to be forcibly upsold because the Backup and Sync app might be used as a funnel to generate gullible leads for Google Drive’s storage plans. Notice I said “might be”; I have no proof of this. It could be that the app is just full of bugs and not well-maintained.

So I did two things: one was to downgrade my storage plan to the minimum of 100 GB at $2/month, and the second was to start looking through my Google Drive in order to see what files were taking up space. I found them but let me tell you, getting rid of them is like pulling teeth. It’s like Google doesn’t want you to get rid of them, so they keep on taking space there and you keep on paying. It’s not right. Let me show you: first you go to Google Drive, and at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, you’ll see how much space you’ve got. My storage quota is under control now, but this is my second day of working on this. Can you believe it? Google has made me waste almost two work days in order to correct a problem that it created.

If you click right on the space used, in my case the 76.6 GB, it’ll take you to a page where it begins to list all of the files that are taking up space on your Google Drive, in descending order based on file size. Here’s where it might be confusing for some: the files that are compressed and don’t count toward your quote are listed with a file size of 0 bytes. This is not an error, those files aren’t really 0 bytes, but they’ve been compressed and as far as your quota is concerned, they’re okay. The files that do count toward your quota will be listed at the top. That’s how I found out that Google doesn’t compress PSD files or TIF files or large DNG files. I had images that were over 100 MB in size, some close to 1 GB in size, that it wasn’t compressing, so I had to delete those. If you want to bring down your storage requirements on Google Drive, you’ll have to do the same. Here’s a screenshot of the page I’m talking about, but keep in mind that I’ve already done the work, so I have no more uncompressed files taking up space. Whatever’s left, it’s in the Trash.

So this part is like pulling teeth. Even though I was using Google’s own browser, Google Chrome, and working on Google’s own service, Google Drive, it was excruciatingly slow to list the files I needed to delete. The page would only pull something like 50 files to display, and if you wanted to see more, you had to scroll down and wait for it to pull up more… and then the browser would almost freeze and give you a warning to let you know the page was eating up too many resources… ugh… what a nasty thing to do to your customers, Google!

Have a look at the resources Chrome was eating up during this whole thing:

This “fun activity” took up most of my two days. Not only did it work like this when I needed to identify the files that I needed to delete, but once they were in the Trash, that page also worked the same way. In the web browser, it would only pull up about 50 files or so for me to delete at once. Even though the “Empty Trash” option was supposed to clear the Trash of all of the files in it, it would only delete the 50 or so files that it pulled up. Sure, you can scroll down, wait for it to pull up 50 more files, scroll down again, etc. until Chrome gives you a warning that the page isn’t working properly anymore, then you can empty the trash, deleting a few hundred files, then go again and again and again. I tell you, I suspect that Google is doing this on purpose so you don’t clean up your Drive and are forced to upgrade your storage plan…

I looked this thing up, and some people had more luck emptying the trash by using the mobile app (for iOS or Android). I tried it on my iPhone and it hung, then crashed. I tried it on my iPad and it would hang, the little Googley kaleidoscope wheel going on and on for hours, and then it would either crash or keep on twirling. I left my iPad with the app open all night after issuing the Empty Trash command and when I came back to it in the morning, it was still twirling away and the files hadn’t been deleted.

So now it’s back to the browser interface for me until I clean up all the files. See the screenshot below with the twirly blue thing in the middle? That’s me waiting on Google to list those files in the Trash… By the way, I bought a 2 TB storage plan on Apple’s iCloud to back up my phones, tablets and computers, and I can share that plan with my family. It costs the same as Google’s 1 TB plan: $10/month.

Will I keep using the Backup and Sync app? Yes, at least for now. The promise of unlimited storage of all my compressed images is a tempting thing. I realize there’s a loss in resolution and quality but God forbid something happen to my files and my backups, at least I have them stored somewhere else and I can recover them; they might not be their former selves, but I’ll have something.

Just FYI, I back up locally and remotely. For local backups I use Mac Backup Guru and for the remote backups I use Backblaze, which I love and recommend. Their app is amazing: blazing fast, low energy footprint, works quietly in the background and has backed up terabytes of data in a matter of 1-2 weeks for me. And as for my hardware, I still use Drobos and I love and recommend them as well. I’ve been using them since 2007 and while I’ve had some issues, I still think they’re the best and most economical expandable redundant storage on the market. I use a Drobo 5D next to my iMac and two Drobo 5N units on the network.

I hope this was helpful to you!

Thoughts

Social media and time spent on websites that produce original content

Here’s something I’ve observed in my own use of social media websites: most of the time they’re so sticky that when I click on an interesting article to read it, I tend to skim through it in order to get back to the social media site where it was posted. Why? My rationale to myself is that I want to see what other articles I might discover. But in truth, I think I’ve gotten so used to skimming the news feed for interesting stuff, that I’m more concerned with that instead of actually taking the proper time to read through the interesting stuff. And that’s not right. And I don’t think I’m the only one doing it.

It could be that we’ve gotten to the point where, without realizing it, we’ve become superficial skimmers, and I blame social media. The very websites whose mission it was (in the beginning) to present us with articles and photos and videos because they allowed users to post links to them, have now reshaped our attention span in such a way that we value browsing the news feed stupidly more than we value reading the actual content for which we browse the news feed in the first place.

What I’ve also seen, because I myself am guilty of it at times, is a tendency to form an opinion about an article from the blurb that I can read on social media, before I can read it in full, or to determine whether it’s worth reading from the title alone. And — and this is shameful but worth talking about — I’ve also caught myself giving an article or a link a like/plus/heart based solely on its title, blurb and accompanying thumbnail, without reading it. Again, I rationalized it to myself by wanting to go back to the news feed, because “I had a limited amount of time” to spend on social media and wanted to catch up on the things that were posted. What a crappy rationalization, right? And yet I don’t think I’m alone; I’m fairly sure others are doing this.

I’m curious to find out if anyone out there is doing or has done research on this and can confirm it.

What I’ve also seen from our own site stats is a drop in our visitors’ attention span. In a word, they’ve become more superficial than before. They don’t spend the proper amount of time to read through something; when I post photo galleries, they don’t look at even half the photos; when I post videos, they don’t even look at a quarter of the video. It’s gotten to the point where we’ll post an article and people will start to ask questions related to it on social media (and this happens to my wife all the time) that are so blatantly ignorant of the very article we’ve posted that it’s crystal clear to us that these people haven’t read the article. They haven’t even clicked through to skim the first paragraph, which would have answered their question.

Some will say that’s fine, we can now post our content directly on social media, in full length, along with the accompanying photos and videos. Perhaps, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve seen the same dropoff in attention spans there. I can attest to this. If a post isn’t short enough to fit within 1-2 sentences, or you post more than 2-3 photos, or you post a video that’s longer than 15-30 seconds, most people will simply not see all of it. They’ll click away. And that defeats the purpose of posting anywhere and also defeats the point of creating content. Not to mention that if you choose to post all your original content on social media, you are no longer in control of it, because it’s not on your website and you don’t get to decide if it stays up or not (down the road). You also destroy a viable business model, which is to post on your own site, make it a treasure trove of valuable information and then monetize it in various ways or use it as a stepping stone to various other projects.

I’m not sure how far this trend will go. Will we have to create shorter articles and write them in the simplest language possible? How much can we communicate doing that? To whom will we be communicating? If audiences can’t handle a page-long article and need us to speak to them in first grade or second grade language, what kind of people are we reaching? What kinds of intellects are we nurturing? Is social media contributing to a “dumbing down” of its users?

Reviews

My Olympus PEN E-P3

I purchased this PEN E-P3 just a few days ago, to add it to my collection of Olympus PEN cameras. As I mentioned in my previous post, I now have all the PEN models except the PEN-F.

I love PEN cameras because they are the smallest full-featured cameras out there. Yes, there are smaller cameras, but they have smaller sensors. And there are small cameras with bigger sensors, but they’re not as small as these cameras, and you have to deal with big, heavy lenses. The PEN cameras are just perfect. The sensor is big enough to allow for great resolution without squeezing pixels too close together and small enough to allow for small, lightweight lenses.

PENs are almost as full-featured as the bigger OM-D cameras (which I also love and which have their own charm, purpose and amazing capabilities), but the PENs are small and light and easy to carry, so they’re perfect for traveling light or for an all-day photo shoot in the studio, when you have to move around and hold the camera at all sorts of angles in order to get that perfect photo. That was and is the Olympus MFT promise: small, lightweight gear and superb image quality. This is why my PEN E-P5 has become my main camera, by the way. I love using it in my studio and I use it everywhere else as well. This is also why I wanted to collect all of the PEN models. I wanted to see their evolution firsthand, from the standard-setting E-P1 to the E-P5 and the PEN-F.

I bought my E-P3 second-hand and there were some scratches to the underside of the camera. I also discovered after the purchase that the IBIS wasn’t working. I talked with the seller about it and it wasn’t malice. The fellow was a beginner and didn’t even know how to adjust the IBIS, much less that it wasn’t working. I guess at some point, the mechanism either broke or got stuck, so I packed it up yesterday and sent it in to one of the Olympus Service Centers in Eastern Europe to have it fixed. I look forward to getting it back in full working order and using from time to time, as I also use my other PEN cameras. They’re not just collectibles to me. They’re also working cameras and it’s important to me that each and every one of them is fully operational.

Before I sent this camera in for service, I mounted the 25mm f1.8 lens on it, plus my newly-arrived MCON-P02 Macro Converter (which I definitely recommend) and went into our garden to take photographs. I wanted to see how the E-P3 had improved upon the E-P2 in image quality. And it definitely has! The color gradation is better and so are the details. It has the same resolution as the E-P2 (12.2 megapixels) but the images are better and there’s less noise.

I do wish I had adopted the PEN system earlier, back in 2010 when I reviewed the E-P2. I think I’d have been pretty happy working with PEN cameras all these years and maybe also getting an OM-D camera. While I can’t change the past, I am working with Olympus gear now and I am very happy with it.

Enjoy the photographs!

Reviews

My Olympus PEN E-P1

Several days ago, I purchased a PEN E-P1. I’ve been thinking about a number of years of collecting all the digital PEN cameras that Olympus has made. I’m not referring to the PL (Pen Lite) or PM (Pen Mini) camera lines, which were launched alongside the regular PEN cameras in an effort to provide lower-cost alternatives for consumers with lower budgets. I’ve wanted to own all of the regular, full-featured PEN cameras, of which there are five models: E-P1, E-P2, E-P3, E-P5 and PEN-F. So when did my love of PEN cameras start? It was when I reviewed the PEN E-P2 back in 2010. I loved that camera and I wanted to have it right there and then, but I was heavily invested in Canon gear at the time. Fast forward to 2018. When I bought the E-P1, I already had the E-P2 and the E-P5 (I also have the first PL model, the E-PL1). Since then, I’ve also purchased the E-P3, so now the only camera left to get for my collection is the PEN-F.

The E-P1 is an important camera. Launched on June 16, 2009, it was the first digital PEN. Fifty years before it came the original PEN, in 1959. Both cameras were revolutionary in their design and their compact size. What Olympus managed to do with the digital PEN was amazing: they managed to give us the features and quality that only came with larger, heavier cameras, in a tiny and light camera body that could be carried in a pocket or a purse. In its time, the E-P1 was the lightest, smallest and most capable camera on the market. It may not have been the best at everything, but it offered image quality that was higher than or comparable to much larger and more expensive cameras with larger sensors. Even today, almost nine years later, when the E-P1 is coupled with a great lens, such as the M.Zuiko 25mm f1.8, it can produce truly beautiful photographs that match quite well the quality of images made with cameras that have full-frame sensors. You’ll see this in the gallery below, which contains photos I’ve taken in our garden with the E-P1 and the 25mm f1.8.

I am fortunate and happy that I was able to build my PEN collection, and that I get to work every day with such great cameras. The PEN E-P5 is my primary camera now, both in the studio and outdoors. I love it. Enjoy the photographs!

A busy little bee visits our sage blossoms

Places

The fortified church in Bazna

The village of Bazna (“Baaßen” in German and “Bázna” in Hungarian) is technically a commune comprised of three villages: Bazna, Boian and Velt. Settled by Saxons in the 13th century, the land was great not only for agriculture but also gave forth natural gas and springs of water containing salt and iodine.

The fortified church you’re about to see in my photographs was built in the 15th century. A hundred years or so later, it gained the surrounding fortified walls and defense tower. You’ll find an oddity in that tower: it’s also a bell tower and it has three bells made sometime between the 14-15th century. That’s not something often seen in Transilvania, where most of the bells were melted to make weapons during WWI.

The church has a caretaker and is well-maintained, which is more (much more) than can be said for most of the other fortified churches in Transilvania.

Enjoy the photographs! I took them in April of 2010.