tl;dr — I bought a drobo then dropped the hard drive I was going to copy onto it. Got emotional on twitter about it.
- visit your friends
- see their big tv, which is not a tv, but a screen, and the drobo blinking beside it
- they call it a drobo, you complain about space
- when they give you a spare hard drive, take it home and say thank you
- look at your pile of drives
- listen to the fans
- add this new drive to the pile
- believe Jason when he mentions the drobo is good
- google the drobo thing
- look at the drobo site
- gasp
- quit your job (unrelated)
- spend hours moving your files around
- wonder what you’ve done with your life
- see it’s all garbage, but there are some things
- look at the drobo site
- gasp again, doubly
- remember Aaron said something about selling his drobo
- ask Aaron if he’s selling his drobo
- be grateful Aaron says his drobo doesn’t work well
- remember the internet is about not paying full price.
- look at amazon, it is cheaper
- add a five-bay drobo to your amazon cart
- close the window
- return to amazon, look at your cart
- add a book you want, like you’re just buying a book
- close the window again
- jason scott will tweet about newegg
- newegg is not amazon
- not amazon is better than amazon
- you will order from new egg
- you will panic momentarily, but tweet about it
- when no one tweets that you are stupid, you will close twitter.
- wait some days
- get the drobo
- realize the drobo wants empty drives, not full ones
- play a shell game of moving things around drives until each is empty
- start with the smallest
- put each empty drive in the drobo, one by one
- call them their sizes: 500gb, 750gb, 1tb, 2tb
- when you are done, see there is really not so much space
- there is still one more drive, which is biggest and still two-thirds full
- see the problem
- try copying some files around, the very big ones
- leave copying for overnight
- when it fails, try again
- there’s still not enough room, think some more
- if there were a place to move these three terabytes, then there would be room in the drobo
- for hours, keep shuffling
- do the math
- take a trip to another city
- return home and tell yourself this trip was not so expensive
- google more hard drives
- order another big hard drive
- do some things because it is the weekend
- realize that nothing ships sunday
- see that for twenty dollars, you can get it on tuesday which is sooner
- look at bank account
- look at shipping options
- do it anyway
- wait (but not as long)
- work all day and all night until it is tuesday
- check the tracking
- out for delivery
- you have not slept, but that’s unimportant
- hear the sound of a truck
- hear the truck drive away
- wait some more, until later
- see the fedex truck and run to the door
- hear the buzzer
- run back
- tell him one second
- be thankful and smile
- run up the stairs
- take a picture of the box
- unpack the box
- take a screenshot of drobo dashboard
- unmount all the hard drives
- unwire the firewires, unplug the plugs
- start turning around the drobo
- bump into the thing
- what is the thing
- this time is so slow
- the thing it is falling
- the drive it is falling
- the drive that is spinning
- the drive with the stuff
- the one with the stuff
- stick out your foot
- foot under the falling
- the crunch of the thing
- oh shit
- wait a second
- no worries, don’t worry
- unwrap the new drive and it goes in the drobo
- now there is room
- plug it in
- it is beeping
- why is it beeping?
- is it really beeping?
- tweet about it. tweeting will help
- delete the tweet.
- unplug the drive
- put the drive in the freezer
- tweet some more
- delete those tweets, too
- take it out of the freezer and plug it in
- it will beep
- and keep beeping
- until you unplug it
- now there is space
- you have some of the files
- when you sleep, you will wonder
- what has been lost?
- and what would it cost?
- and does it all matter?
- and when will you know that something is missing?
- and what of the rest?
- and you will dream
that the knowing - was always out of reach