What else is going to go wrong

Some times I feel very nostalgic for the good old days. You know the days of film. Those were the days. You took your photographs and gave your film to a nice person who would process your pictures for you. They would even give you a call when they were done, so you could go and collect them. The nice people at the processing lab would do all the worrying about getting your pictures the right colour and exposure. Ah! Those were the days when a computer was just for sending emails.

Now we rely on computers for image processing and filing our pictures, sending them and selling them to clients. If you haven’t got a working computer you can’t do anything. Putting a disc drive on a light box just doesn’t work. When everything is running well, computers are a wonderful tool. But when they go wrong, your whole business is put on hold until you can fix the problem. So, maybe we have just been unlucky, but the last three months have been a nightmare as all we seem to be doing is lurching from one failure to another.
First it was our Drobo NAS (Network Attached Server). It started corrupting files as they were saved to it. For a full description of the problems you can read our previous blogs (Drobo problems and Drobo problems continue). After Data Robotic had swapped out the faulty unit we have had a whole 6 weeks of use out of the new Drobo unit. Then yesterday the new unit stopped working altogether. We tried all the previous things suggested by the Data Robotics support team but we still have broken Drobo unit again. And as always these things go wrong at the end of the day when the support lines have closed for the day. We will keep you posted as to what happens next.

Working backwards, the other day, in fact the day after we went to daylight saving here in the UK; the software we use to file to our pictures Extensis Portfolio, developed a fault. When we opened the database on Monday morning most of the files in the system were reported as having being changed. A bit of explanation is perhaps necessary, as to the way Extensis Portfolio works. Portfolio is a database based filing system. The original files sit on our Drobo NAS and the Portfolio references these files over our network. Portfolio records the time and date the file was modified, in the database. If the modification date changes on the storage medium, Portfolio reports that the file has been changed. Portfolio then synchronises the database record and the modified file. It does this by re-reading the changed file, generating new thumbnails and updating any keyword and other changes.

Now we are pretty sure that the files had not been changed as we were out of the office on the Sunday after the clocks changed. Suddenly we had thousands of files that according to Portfolio needed to be imported again. Importing a hundred images into Portfolio is something we do quite regularly. We start the process running and come back in a few hours and it should be finished. Can you imagine synchronising thousands of files, it was unthinkable.

We contacted the Extensis support team, via email as they are based in the USA. So far is that many emails have passed backwards and forwards and we are still waiting for Extensis to come back with a solution to our problem. We do need to continue working so we have had to resort to resetting the clocks on the computers we use the Portfolio software on. This temporary fix at least allows us to use the software, to recover our pictures, even if we can’t file any new work. Reading the forums it would appear that we are not the only users who have reported this problem. Maybe if enough of us phone the support team, Extensis may be encouraged to come up with a permanent solution to the problems with their software.

Another problem we have encountered is with Microsoft Windows 7 x64, mapping network drives. Again reading the forums it appears that others out there are having the same problem. We have a NAS drive mapped to a drive letter on Windows 7. All was working well with the drive reconnecting at each login. Then a couple of weeks ago Windows started reporting that it could not reconnect to the NAS drive. Now if you look at the network the NAS is there. You can map to it using UNC (Universal Naming Convention) and you can access the files. But the mapped drive still does not work. If anyone has any ideas how to cure this problem we would be very glad to here from them, as Microsoft don’t seem to have any ideas.

The list goes on. An upgrade to our McAfee anti virus software caused problems. These upgrades happened automatically and rendered two of our computers with no anti virus software or firewall protection. We contacted McAfee technical support and they were able to solve the problem by uninstalling the software. Mind you this was not a simple uninstall, it required a special peace of software. This had to be downloaded from the support team. This rid the computers of the left over bits from the old version of the software. Once the two computers were cleaned, we then needed to download and reload the McAfee software. Now the problem is resolved but it did take a whole day to sort the problem out. A day we could have used to earn some money. Instead of getting two computers working again after a software upgrade.

Anyone one of these problems would be damaging in its own right, but collectively it has been a disaster. For the last few months, we seem to have been spending nearly as much time trying to get computers working, as we have making pictures. When you make a decision to buy new software and hardware, we spend a fair amount of time trying to make sure that the software will work in the environment we are trying to use it in. Having said that you always expect problems will occur with new software or when you install new hardware. Why?  Well it is impossible for the publishers and manufactures to test against all the possible combinations their software and hardware will encounter. So you expect some problems at the start. What we think is reasonable is, that if we don’t change anything, it keeps working, not develops more and more problems.

So the task is to contact Data Robotics support yet again. See if they can get the Drobo unit working again or supply a new one. Hopefully this will be in days and not the weeks of the last problem. We are just keeping our fingers crossed that nothing else breaks before we can get some work done.

Until next time.