The Minton Family.com

The girls are back in school..WOOHOO!  They both got their preferred teachers and are so far doing great!  I took popsicles to Lana’s class yesterday to celebrate her birthday since she has a summer birthday and can’t bring in treats then.

Having the boys at home during the day has been…well, interesting. We have spent some time outside when the weather has been nice, including a trip to the park.  Right now, Levi is taking his turn on the iPad while Jonah colors and I’m making lunch.

I took the boys to meet their teachers this morning.  They were both surprisingly clingy for the first little bit, but then neither wanted to leave!  They will officially start next Wednesday!

We are heading to Grandpa and Gram’s in Schaumburg for Labor Day weekend.  The girls are looking forward to the much awaited trip to the American Girl Store in Chicago and getting to visit with Grandpa and Gram!

We had a great time in KY the first part of August.  Jada and Dale spent most of their time in the pool!  Levi got brave enough to let go of the side of the pool and doggie paddle around (his swimsuit has a floating part to it).  Jonah loved playing with all of Dale’s cars!

About 30 new pictures were uploaded last night.  These were uploaded to the Family Pictures location, not to the Cell Phone Pictures location.

Ever wonder why I don’t upload them more often?  Here’s what I do everytime I take pictures off the camera:

• Copy them and the digital camera videos from the camera into folders of the dates they were taken
• Create RAR (compressed archives) of them with recovery records
• Copy them to my file server
• Open ACDSee and tag every photo with who is in it, and often, what it’s about (birthday, etc.)
• Write the ACDSee tags to the photos (inside the file) so tags are retained when uploading to Fotki
• Upload the photos to ACDSee where they retain their tags
• Upload the RAR files (includes original, unedited photos and digital camera videos) to Amazon S3
• Copy ACDSee database to Amazon S3
• Copy everything (photos, videos, RAR files) to a 2nd harddrive on my file server
• Copy ACDSee database to my file server so it’s now backed up
• An automated process copies the RAR files to an external harddrive
• An automated process copies the ACDSee files to an external harddrive

This gives me 3 local copies of all my digital camera photos and videos (kid memories, right?), two remote copies of the pictures (one at Fotki, and one at Amazon S3), and one remote copy of the digital camera videos (Amazon S3).

The idea is to never lose the digital memories.  With multiple local copies, it’s unlikely I’ll ever need to rely on my remote copies.  In the even of something locally catastrophic, everything is mirrored remotely.  In the event one of the remote companies goes out of business, they are mirrored at two.  One of the remote copies (Fotki) also doubles as a method of viewing the photos from any internet connection.

With four beautiful children, and literally over 15,000 photos (primarily of them), that’s how I go to bed feeling safe that their memories are as safe as can be reasonably expected.

I just hope they appreciate it when they’re older.

Daddy