Wapsi Square Forum

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

Atomic wrote:You have a web account -- have you considered using your web hosting function if they have one? This assumes you're not hosting stuff you expecting to be seen a gazillion times, just a few buncha hits each.

I use my web-hosting account to post pictures too big for the board's "Attachment" function to accept.

But this only works if you stay forever with the same internet provider... Will they be there for you, when you move to a different area of the country, for whatever reason you happen to move? Or move out of country, for that matter? Studying abroad? Finally marrying that special someone you had a long-distance relationship with, and moving to wherever they are from?

What if your internet provider starts getting greedy, and wanting more and more for their service, and you find that their competitor has much better pricing? (But then, this takes us back to the original post, where Photobucket decided to get greedy... )

lake_wrangler wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

Atomic wrote:You have a web account -- have you considered using your web hosting function if they have one? This assumes you're not hosting stuff you expecting to be seen a gazillion times, just a few buncha hits each.

I use my web-hosting account to post pictures too big for the board's "Attachment" function to accept.

But this only works if you stay forever with the same internet provider... Will they be there for you, when you move to a different area of the country, for whatever reason you happen to move? Or move out of country, for that matter? Studying abroad? Finally marrying that special someone you had a long-distance relationship with, and moving to wherever they are from?

What if your internet provider starts getting greedy, and wanting more and more for their service, and you find that their competitor has much better pricing? (But then, this takes us back to the original post, where Photobucket decided to get greedy... )

I didn't say i use space at my ISP.

I pay $7.99 a month for hosting services for my web page. There's lots of room {unlimited space, for all practical purposes} so i store pictures there. As long as i own electronictiger.net and pay the monthly fee, it's there.

If i ever decide to move to another hosting provider, i download everything and upload it on the new servers.

I know you have your own web site, and are not using your ISP's hosting. But that's what Atomic was referring to, in his comment, as far as I know. And so that's what I was referring to as well. I just didn't pay attention to who was replying to him, when I grabbed the quoted text.

lake_wrangler wrote:I know you have your own web site, and are not using your ISP's hosting. But that's what Atomic was referring to, in his comment, as far as I know. And so that's what I was referring to as well. I just didn't pay attention to who was replying to him, when I grabbed the quoted text.

Gotcha.

In my case I borrow Web Access from a normal of sources, so no actual ISP that I control an account over.

(If I was going to be paying $8 for Hosting I'd put it towards an actual Internet hardline [looks like DSL is the only current option, geographically, at this time...],
but there continues to be preceding Infrastructure projects in progress that preclude much more than an Internet Hotspot here @ 'Base Camp'.

My situation's peculiar, so lets not leave any options off the table, but in my particular sit'ch I'm looking for something like Imgur...

I just use Imgur to host images. Pretty user friendly, completely free, does what I want it to do.

Honestly, Photobucket had enough troubles with competition as it was. This is the kiss of death for it. They may struggle and flail around a bit longer, but ultimately... they have spelled their own doom.

Dave wrote:Doom.

I expected some marvel with a can on his head. This was way more disturbing.

Bailed after only 35 seconds, and I can still hear it.

Dave wrote:Doom.

Yes, using your ISP to host your images lasts only as long as you have an ISP account, so there's that, and ditto a web service like PhotoWhatzit, but the Ultimate Solution is your own host. There's plenty to be had for under 20$ a month or less. I use Dream Host.

Typeminer wrote:I expected some marvel with a can on his head. This was way more disturbing.

That, disturbing? Bosh. There wasn't even any bologna involved.

You should just see what happens if you give an invading alien any sort of access to bologna.

No, actually, you shouldn't.

It's disturbing.

Dave wrote:

Typeminer wrote:I expected some marvel with a can on his head. This was way more disturbing.

That, disturbing? Bosh. There wasn't even any bologna involved.

You should just see what happens if you give an invading alien any sort of access to bologna.

No, actually, you shouldn't.

It's disturbing.

Huh, That's not Doom... THIS is Doom!

Oh? I thought this, was Doom...

That's the guy!

Well done. btw- I signed up w/ Imgur, loaded up two test pix, will follow up w/ pros/cons...

I just went browsing my old Photobucket albums... Most of what I have on there is still on my Nook, and not only that, but all the stuff that isn't replaceable (if they truly aren't, I'd have to check) isn't really worth saving anyway.

FWIW, if you're going to be seriously posting for online use, get organized and mirror your online stuff with a local (backup) directory. One of the tricks I've learned about the various apps that generate data (Word, Excel, Gimp, etc) is they each tend to dump stuff willy-nilly in your computer to their (default) liking. I made a /Data directory with lots of Subs for Art, Bills, Desktops, Graphics, Family, Stories, Website, etc, including my Mail system archive, and change the app defaults to somewhere in there. This way when I want to back things up, I can simply drag and drop my entire /Data directory into my external drive as a unit rather than chase things down. I just D&D my Website main folder into the local one first, and I'm done!

/2017-01/Data...
/2017-02/Data...
/2017-03/Data...
and so on.

The times I've had to rebuild my compubox (3 times in past 5 years for various reasons), I spent more time reinstalling the apps than on restoring the data.

Good luck!

Really good backup software can help a lot like that. Unfortunately, the backup software I like and rely on (BackInTime - included, or available through the software manager, in most Linux distributions) has, in free software for Windows, only an almost-equivalent. And one thing the almost-equivalent really falls down on how to get a new installation of it to recognize and pick up on backups from an old installation.

(I recently replaced my hard drive. First time I ran the backup software's GUI after the replacement, it said "hey, I don't have a configuration file - is there an old backup?" I told it yes and guided it to the top of the most recent backup. From there it automatically picked itself up and was ready to resume where the previous installation had left off. That's how these things should work.)

--- Warning - I'm about to get somewhat technical. ---

One reason the Windows almost-equivalent falls down is a legacy issue: it's willing to put its backups on disks formatted with the FAT file system characteristic of MS-DOS and of Windows up to and including WindowsME (but not WindowsNT except for very early versions, or Windows2000). The structure of FAT file systems does not support having two directory entries pointing at the same file - disk scans consider this an error, and deleting either directory entry causes the space the file occupies to become "vacant" and available for reuse. More sophisticated file systems, such as those used in Unix a decade before MS-DOS was pulled out of the scrap-pile and made a major OS, intelligently handle having multiple directory entries for a single file.

This matters when you want to have two full backups. If the backups are on a FAT-formatted disk, two full backups take twice the space of one. If they are on NTFS or EXT3 or.. um... whatever OSX uses, there can be only one copy of the files that haven't changed, with two (or more) directory entries pointing at it. On a home computer usually the large majority of files - by both count and space - don't change for months or years at a time, so there's a HUGE savings. The backup job that protects my writing and related stuff, one full backup takes about 1.4 GB but most additional full backups actually take no more than 1/1000 that much space. (Making a new directory entry pointing at an existing file is also faster than making a new directory entry and copying a file.)

One effect of this is there is no tradeoff between backup frequency and space, and a minimal tradeoff between backup frequency and system performance. (The former is reduced to identifying work files that don't need backed up because they'll be automatically rebuilt as needed or are used only for short-term storage.) The folder my writing is in gets backed up every two hours - if something has changed. In two hours I don't change enough stuff to notice the momentary slowdown while the computer identifies and copies a tiny handful of files and builds new directory entries for everything that didn't change.

But if you allow the backup to be on FAT, you can't do that.

So the Windows almost-equivalent fakes it, by giving backup copies of all files new names and moving the real directory structure and file names into a database - replicating the more-sophisticated file systems. Which means your backups are pretty much useless unless you have a special plugin installed and configured to recognize those backups. And getting a new installation of the software to recognize old backups is a pain - or at least it was last I looked. (Which was last year, so maybe they've recognized this problem and fixed it.)

I come here fer Entertainment & I end up Learn'n Stuff...

Warrl -- that has me a bit concerned. If I'm understanding the method properly, the method archives the directory and presumes the target files still exist. If those files go away, then what? Is the backup on another drive than the original? The last thing you want to have happen is bork the original (source) drive then have the (external?) back point to where the corpses used to be, and have nothing there.

Compressed backups, sure, but using a mirror of the whole file set being backed up, not just the directory. Even incremental backups that snapshot the file changes du jour still rely on an original file as the starting point for the backup retrieval.

If your backup is on the same drive as the original, it may be a duplicate but not much of a backup if the drive fails.

Have I missed the point?

I use my Google Drive to host pics and such. Occasionally I use my book of Face to post pics as well.