Day 364 Computer Woes

Friday 30 December


Last night when uploading my photo on the computer a message flashed up saying the startup disc was nearly full.  As it was late I just closed the Mac down and went to bed and Ian & I tackled it this morning.  Startup disc turned out to mean the complete hard drive! We've a terabyte drive and  998GB were used! Aarrgh.  We moved a load of photos and stuff over onto a separate hard drive but that only freed up about 100GB, there was obviously something fishy going on.  Ian had to go over to Huw's where he'd promised to help him install more loft insulation so I was left to figure it out.  


My hunch proved right that it was to do with our email account.  A couple of weeks ago Ian emailed a very large file containing several pictures and a video clip.  It was over 200mb and not suprisingly the computer struggled!  Eventually the recipient let us know he'd received the files ok.  Ever since then our aol email has been running very slow and recently hasn't been picking up new mail. The little rotating circle signifying its thinking just keps on circling and Ian's message and photos had appeared in a mail folder entitled "Recovered from my Mac" Whenever I deleted this message it would just reappear.  Anyway after a bit of research I found this was not an uncommon problem and the root of our storage issues. This 200mb file had duplicated itself over 2,000 times! It was possible to delete these although not by obvious means and I immediately acquired an extra 650 GB of free space!  Aol still wasn't behaving itself but I left it to visit Mum & Dad.  By the time I got home late in the afternoon Ian had solved the final bit of the puzzle and everything is working fine.  Hurrah!  Computers are great but a real pain when they do stupid things like that!  


Anyway I didn't have time for a photo,again, until late this evening so here's another tabletop construction.  As I had a blue theme yesterday I've gone for red today.  

Tomorrow will be my last photo and I'd like to make it a good one although I do struggle with these grey rainy days.  Being as it will be New Years Eve I'll probably do my final post on 1st January and then that will be the end of this blog :(  I'm going to leave it as a single year project and will switch back to posting on Mog's Travels when we do anything interesting.  I'll continue taking lots of photos but without the relentless pressure of having to do one every day.  I'm still considering my options for sharing them - more on that in the New Year.