I love my computer, really I do.  But, I’m pretty hard on them.  Mainly, I eat a lot of memory.  Lots.  Of.  Memory.

I also didn’t realize what could happen if you run out of said memory.  I found out this weekend.  300 gigs and I used it up, baby!  I have a dual hard drive system set up with RAID, which means that everything I do is automatically mirrored on another drive automatically so I don’t have to back anything up.  Yeah, right.  Well, here’s the thing - if you run out of hard drive space the computer really can’t function - it can’t save anything, it can’t write temporary files, you can’t even BACK ANYTHING UP because it needs HARD DRIVE SPACE to write temporary files! 

So, as I’m combing my computer looking for anything and everything I can delete, I’m not making much progress.  I can’t delete anything until I can BACK IT UP.  I uninstall unnecessary programs, of which there weren’t much, delete all my temp files, my internet temp files, old emails.  Wow, I freed up a GIG.  I needed at least FOUR GIGS freed up.  Sigh… at least that was according to the DVD burner that I was trying to use to back up my RAW image files so I could delete them off my hard drive. 

Finally, I found some files I could delete - evidently I had some old image catalogs backed up so I had 2 copies.  I was so excited!!!!  Now I could back up my files - yippee!  Now mind you, I’m a little bit of a techno geek who’s gone rusty.  I used to really be up on the latest technology and still am to an extent, but I never really burned DVD’s.  We had a stand alone DVD burner that died after about 6 months, but that’s it.  I’m not one to download movies or whatever.  So I  had no idea how long it took to burn a DVD. 

RAW files are huge.  Just so you know.  They are the images that come off the camera - no edits to them.  I figured out that 3 sessions would fit on a DVD.  I did the old ‘drag and drop’ and started to write the files.  Sigh of relief.  4 hours later it’s NOT DONE.  And get this - it timed out 90% of the way done.  Froze up my whole system and I had to ditch the whole thing.  I got nothing done. 

If you’re waiting on a session preview, please know I’m working on them now!  I freed up 10 gigs of space and that will get me through until I can dump some stuff to DVD, an online storage site, or something!  Thanks for being patient!!