Reviews

A review of Google’s Backup and Sync

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Google launched this new service in the second half of 2017. I remember being prompted by the Google Drive app to install an upgrade, and after it completed, I noticed a new app called “Backup and Sync” had been installed, and the Google Drive app had become an alias.

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The new app sat there unused for some time, until I discovered its new capability, namely to back up and sync other folders on my computer, not just the Google Drive folder. This was and is good, new functionality for Google, because it ties in very nicely with its Photos service, which has already been offering the ability to back up all of the photos and videos taken with mobile devices to the cloud through the Google Photos mobile app. I’ve been using Google Photos for several years, going back to when it was called Picasa Web.

I set it to back up all of my photos and videos, allowing Google to compress them so I could back up the whole lot. (It’s the “High quality (free unlimited storage)” option selected in the screenshot posted below.)

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I already back up all of my data with Backblaze, which I love and recommend, but it doesn’t hurt to have a second online backup of my media, even if it gets compressed. Having lost some 30,000 images and videos a few years back, I know full well the sting of losing precious memories and when it comes down to it, I’d rather have a compressed backup of my stuff than none at all.

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The thing is, there are shortcomings and errors with this new service from Google, which I will detail below. The backup itself was fast. Even though I have several terabytes of personal media, they were uploaded within a week. So that’s not the issue. After all, Google has a ton of experience with uploads, given how much video is uploaded to YouTube every single day.

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As you can see from the screenshot posted above, it was unable to upload quite a few files. The app offers the option of uploading RAW files in addition to the typical JPG, PNG and videos, but it couldn’t upload RAW files from Olympus (ORF), Adobe (DNG) and Canon (CR2). They were listed among the over 2700 files that couldn’t be backed up.

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I ended up having to add the extensions of RAW, PSD, TIFF and other files to an “ignore” list located within the app preferences. This is the full list I’ve added there so far: DNG, TIFF, RAF, CRW, MOV, PSD, DB, GRAPHDB, PLIST, and LIJ. It seems there’s a file size limit on images and on videos, because most of my large images (stitched panoramas) and videos of several GB or more didn’t get uploaded. That’s a problem for an app that promises to back up all your media.

There were also quite a bit of crashes. The app crashed daily during the upload process and even now, it crashes every once in a while. I set up my computer to send crash reports to Apple and to the app developers, so I assume that Google got them and will at some point issue an upgrade that fixes those bugs.

I also kept running out of space on my Google account. Given that I’d set the app to compress my images so I’d get “free unlimited storage”, and I’d also set it to back up only my images and videos, this didn’t and doesn’t make sense. Add to this the fact that it’s trying to back up unsuccessfully all sorts of other non-image files (see the paragraph above where I had to add all sorts of extensions to the ignore list) and once again, this app seems like it’s not fully baked. I ended up having to upgrade my storage plan with Google to 1 TB, so it’s costing me $9.99/month to back up most (not all) of my images and videos, compressed, to a service that offers “free, unlimited storage”. The app says I’ve now used up 408 GB of my 1 TB plan. Before I started backing up my media, I was using about 64 GB or so, adding together Gmail and Google Drive. So about 340 GB are getting mysteriously used by some invisible files that I can’t see in Google Photos or Google Drive, but they’re obviously stored somewhere by the Backup and Sync app.

Remember, this is Google. They have a ton of experience with apps, with images and with videos, so why did they push this out when it still has all these issues?

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Thoughts

Fun with technology

I’ve had multiple Drobo units since 2007. To this day, I still enjoy adding a hard drive to a Drobo. It’s one of those things that can be an ordeal on other tech, but on a Drobo, it’s been made fun through proper planning and design.

It lets you that it’s low on space, you order a drive, and when it comes, you look at the app, which tells you exactly what size-drive is in each bay. Pressing a small lever on the side of the bay releases the drive, which slides out. You put the new one in, the Drobo immediately checks it and formats it, then begins striping the data set across it. By the way, that’s a screen shot showing my Drobo 5D.

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I love this process. It’s so simple and so fun! The Drobo doesn’t care what hard drive you buy, as long as it’s larger than what you already had. It allows you to grow the capacity of your Drobo in time, as the prices for newer, bigger hard drives decrease, without any sort of headaches. This is technology done right.

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Thoughts

Idiosyncracies at Apple

Why is iTunes being used as the sync hub for all media and mobile apps?

Do you remember iSync? It was the app that Apple made specifically for syncing devices to their computers. It worked pretty nicely to sync contacts and calendars from the Mac to a mobile phone (this was before the iPhone came out). I used it to sync my Nokia E63 and N95 to my iMac and MacBook Pro.

I wrote about this back in 2011 as well. The problem is still there. Why are we syncing contacts, calendars, movies, TV shows and mobile apps, through an app designed for music and named for music? Why not have an app that’s properly named, where we sync everything we want, through a brand new interface?

What name should we pick for it? The clue is right there in the name for a product recently launched: Apple Music. The central app should be called Apple and it should be available on both desktops and mobile devices. It shouldn’t even have a name, it should just be the Apple icon. We’ll click on it to connect with Apple and sync our devices, purchase apps, music, movies, hardware, etc. That’s right, I’m talking about a unified interface with a single, seamless web presence where we can buy and sync everything Apple and everything made or coded for Apple, which is accessible through an Apple icon from our computers or mobile devices. No more iTunes Store and App Store and a separate Apple Store!

iTunes can remain but it’ll need to be renamed to something else, since we play both movies and music in it. Apple Media perhaps? How about Apple Player?

Why are there two apps for messaging?

We have FaceTime and Messages. What happened to iChat? Let’s put these two apps together again. Apple lost so much ground when someone else (WhatsApp and others) made a unified app that keeps text, media sharing and video chat together. Why would we need two apps (two places we need to check and open up) when one can do the job?

They should marry these two apps and call the new app… Apple Talk. It makes sense and Apple already owns the trademark on it.

 

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Places

Autumn in our garden

Now that winter is almost here, I thought I’d show you a few photographs from the autumn we’ve had this year. A few of them are from our courtyard, most are from our garden. Enjoy!

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Thoughts

Enough with aiding society’s trash

I am fed up with all of the aid that the world’s various governments give to society’s trash. How long have we been doing it? In some form or another, governments have been handing money out to people, with surprisingly little control over who gets it, for almost 100 years now. The way these programs are currently run, they’re not really helping those who truly deserve help, and they’re providing too much help to those who don’t deserve it. If anything, I see societies slowly declining and I see more and more goldbricks and welfare swindlers around every day. I have had it with these parasites who are walking about and poisoning our societies on our own money!

I want to make myself clear so you don’t get the wrong idea. When I talk about societal parasites, I’m talking about trash of any color and breed. I mean those who won’t work because they know they can wiggle their way through the welfare system without doing it. I mean the ones who can work, are offered jobs but won’t take them, the ones who have no problems turning down an honest day’s work but have no problem selling their children into sex, the ones begging in the streets even though they’re perfectly healthy, the ones who’d rather commit crimes instead of getting a job. Those are the shitheads I’m talking about.

I am not talking about people who have lost their jobs, who need a temporary helping hand, a leg up, who can’t get by even though they’re working, because their jobs don’t pay enough for them to support their families, the widowed, the elderly, the disabled and any other honest folks I might have not mentioned here. By all means, let’s help these people! As a matter of fact, if we stopped helping the shitheads I named in the previous paragraph, I bet we’d have a lot of money that we could use to help these people, who are truly deserving of our help.

It’s fiscally irresponsible to just hand money out without thoroughly checking who gets it and what they do with it but then, when have we known politicians in general to be fiscally responsible? It’s very easy to spend someone else’s money, especially when it means you can be a populist and earn cheap votes from all the scumbags who never do an honest day’s work, simply by promising to keep their aid flowing.

This sort of thing does nothing but encourage the same kind of disgusting behavior we now see in most developed countries of the world: shitty people being shitty, all day long, all over the place. Think about your own community for example: you know exactly who these shitty people are, the ones who live on welfare and multiply like fleas because they get more government aid that way. They’re filthy drunkards and/or drug addicts, horrible parents and as humans, they’re not only subpar, I doubt they even qualify for the title. In countries where it’s allowed, they are out begging on the streets, teaching their children to do the same, sometimes even mutilating them (yes, you read that right) in order to make them into better beggars.

In Romania for example, these assholes get free government-subsidized housing, which they shit on, literally. They get new housing and in a few years, it’s unrecognizable, in part because they shit around it and in it. Yes, in it, you read that right. They have toilets but don’t use them. They shit and piss outside the buildings, in the hallways and in their apartments. They get free TVs, free furniture, subsidized utility bills (they can spend all the energy they want, they only pay 5-15 lei per month). In return, they do nothing but evil. The law says they’re supposed to do some community work per month, but no one holds them to it. They go out and they beg on the streets. They steal. They have more children in order to have more benefits. They break the law more often than you can keep track. They pollute the city with their garbage, which they throw everywhere, including right out the window, so it piles up next to their free housing. They pollute the cities with their noise because they play their TVs and stereos loud all the time. They have fights on the streets. The list goes on and on. It’s utterly disgusting to watch them and no one wants to see them around. Come voting day, they pile up at the booths to vote for whatever politician bribed them off (the going rate is about 50-75 lei per vote). And they continue to get welfare from the government. Why in hell does that happen?

Why do we aid them? Why do we, the tax-paying citizens who support our governments and who work hard, some of us seven days a week, not just five, allow populist politicians to give our tax money to this societal detritus, to these walking piles of filth who pollute our cities and our lives? Why? That is a question for which I have yet to receive an adequate answer.

Some say it’s because the crime rate would go up, that these societal parasites would resort to crime of all sort in order to get some cash, and that we need to placate them with a monthly stipend. To that I reply that they (the parasites) are already engaging in illegal and criminal behavior. And besides, that’s we have we have police forces. I’d much rather know that my tax money goes to pay the salary of honest policemen who won’t hesitate to shoot down a parasite who is committing a crime, rather than have it go to helping that same parasite get drunk or drugged or sit in his or her own filth all day, watching TV.

Are you winching at the idea of cleaning up the filth of the world? Why? Are you more content to see it polluting your world, day in and day out, while you support it with your own money?

Some say that we need to work on rehabilitating the scumbags. To that I say they’re welcome to do it on their own dime and time. I have yet to see these efforts succeed even marginally. Some people are born to be shit and they’re going to be shit for as long as you allow them to be around.

Some say that out of the parasites we sometimes get people who rise up and become good citizens. To that I say I’ve heard enough about the exceptions to the rule. We need to stop worrying about the 0,001% of societal parasites who might at some unknown time become worthwhile people and deal with them as a class right now, the way they deserve to be dealt with.

So why are we spending so much of our money (it’s still our money even if we give it to the government in the form of taxes, I hope you realize that) to support those who don’t deserve any support whatsoever? Why?! Why don’t we cut them loose and help those who truly deserve it?

In case you’re wondering what we can do with the societal detritus, I have a plan and it’s this: mandatory community service. If they want government aid, they need to be out there on the streets, every single day, cleaning up our towns, everywhere. Whatever work to be done in our communities, they report for work every morning and they they get it done properly, under close supervision, otherwise they get nothing. They sweep the streets. They clean the garbage cans. They scrub grafitti off the walls. They scoop the poop leftover from wayward pets and the gum off the sidewalk. They clean our city parks and pull out the weeds. Etc… this list can go on and on. And it should also be mandatory for them to keep their places of living clean, to do everything by the letter of the law, or they stop getting aid. They get caught doing anything illegal, in jail they go, where they do mandatory work assigned to them.

As for the people who deserve help, I bet we can all think of hundreds of ways to help them, besides those currently available in our various countries.

Come on, let’s put a stop to the filth of society already!

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