Sticker on the cable bag of my Maxtor external firewire drive, purchased over the weekend.

I’m currently on my third external firewire drive. The first two are 250GBs, this one is 500GBs. Someone suggested that I get a 1TB (terabyte) drive, but I’m willing to wait — prices will always decrease for storage while capacity increases.

I have several archiving methods which include making a backup of a memory card download direct to DVD even before I cull any dud photos or do any editing. That DVD of full unedited originals gets filed chronologically.

I shoot on average 1,000 photos or more per month, so I burn a backup of about a month’s worth of shooting and editing and file that, too. Additionally, I archive each quarter of a year’s worth of photo libraries (2008 Q1, Q2, etc.) over to an external drive, separate from any other archiving.

I only keep three months (one quarter) of photos on my G4 PowerBook at any one time because it travels quite a bit and it only has an 80GB hard drive. All my email is stored on other servers (.Mac, gmail, the office, etc.), and my documents, calendars, address book, and bookmarks are synched with iDisk to Apple’s servers. I can retrieve them using any browser and can access most things from my iPod Touch.

Basically, if my PowerBook G4 ever fails, the only things I lose are the applications, which are no big deal. The only area I haven’t covered is if my house collapses or explodes because I need to move either the DVDs or an external drive with full backup off-site.

Are you a big archivist? Or are you willing to take a technological gamble? It’s time for a poll!

Coaster wisdom, brought to you by Monica’s comment. I looked down and there it was in front of me, Monica!

Today’s cameraphone pic: Lord and Lady of Leisure.

Laundry day at the House of Fielding, because Beano (I’m told by the catsitter) threw up on my bed a couple of times over the weekend. He seemed under the weather last night — warmer than usual, very pink nose, listless, antisocial — so I watched him carefully, but he’s definitely perked up today. I’ve booked an ultrasound in September for The Old Bean since the spring, which may or may not provide further information about his heart murmur and overall health and well-being. Hopefully this latest little blip was just all it appeared to be: a bump in the road of old age.

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Wow, it’s been a whirlwind long weekend but I have nothing but good stories about it all, including the drive home with three people who answered my Craigslist ad for ridesharing. Three cheers for carpooling!

I’m writing this in recovery mode from the wonderful dinner you see here (and more, consumed but unpictured), prepared for me by my host in Quebec City. It is my first visit here and I rolled up at dinnertime from a long drive that started in Toronto this morning. Look what I was greeted with!

I had two passengers with me from Toronto to Montreal, people who each responded to my ad in Craigslist for a shared ride east. There was another person who was a tentative but didn’t come because he SLEPT IN* and I said we weren’t going to wait for him. But the three of us who did travel had a quick five-hour drive to Montreal thanks to music and plenty of easyflowing conversation. I dropped them off downtown and found my way to the Pont Jacques-Cartier to continue to Quebec City.

Strangely, THIS bridge photo was the only one of the batch I uploaded from my cameraphone via email that was posted to Flickr. I have several others, but I’m not reposting them now in case they’re all delayed in a data bottleneck and get released in the middle of the night, making me eat my words… really, I can’t eat my words, in fact, I can’t eat anything else — did you see my dinner plate? I’m going to crash and burn now, because Georges warned me it is going to be A VERY EARLY MORNING. We’re heading up north!

* There’s more to this story, it’s funnier in person. Remind me to tell you later!

I should’ve known the baby gates were no match for a persistent kitty. Not this one, anyway. You can practically see the calculations and computations going on in his head: “Hmmm… will it hold me if I jump from here?”

Xena would’ve figured it out eventually, given time. She’s pretty clever: she’ll just kick back and leave the plotting and scheming to Beano and copy whatever solution he’s found. Why reinvent the wheel?

It was pathetic the way they’d stick their paws through the fence gaps, like I’d shoved them into a carrier and took them to the vet. It was also getting a little absurd: I had to line the top of the landing with tall objects to stop them from jumping up to a launching point for the stairs, but one time when I was taking out the rubbish I heard a thump and knew Beano had jumped up and knocked something over to get down.

‘So much for that,’ I thought to myself.

It wasn’t until very recently that Beano got bold enough to test out the sturdiness of the gates, which is something I’m sure he’d done with the drying racks, only to arrive at the conclusion that they were wobbly and as stable as a pile of wire hangers.

But Beano somehow managed to find the time in his busy schedule of catnapping and litterbox excavations to conduct a weight-and-balance test on the second gate:

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My friend told me she can’t find 3-ply bathroom tissue in the U.S. I haven’t noticed.

Is this true, my American friends? Are you wiping your bottoms with less than your northern neighbours?