Disappearing view

I'm not going to be able to take pictures of the neighbouring hill for much longer now.  The trees in our garden are putting on their usual early summer growth and it won't be long before the shoots start to interfere with this view.

As I was taking this shot, I had the misfortune to see a magpie raiding one of the small birds nests in the garden. Nature is red in tooth and claw, or so they say, but it is very difficult to sit back and just watch it happen.

On a slightly more positive note, a parcel has arrived today with a new laptop computer to tide us over until such time as the main one gets sorted out.  With Cathy looking to work from home for some months to come the prospect of being left without a computer if the aged 2011 laptop failed were just not worth thinking about.

Fortunately the back up system has worked perfectly.  I was able to install the broken machine's cloned hard disk straight onto the new machine with the minimum of fuss and all seems to be working perfectly.  I type this with crossed fingers as I realised that something is bound to go wrong if I tempt fate too much.  

I have however forgotten one thing.  The new machine does not come with a dedicated network port, instead you have to plug in an apple adapter so that it can use one of the thunderbolt ports.  Needless to say, I had not thought to order one of those, so we are relying on WiFi at the moment,  until Amazon deliver their next little parcel.

However, what this has made me do, is take another good long look at my backup systems.  I seem to be running out of space on both my network attached storage systems.  Something to do with the increasing number of photos that I have stored?  The other thing that I thought that I had better do is to check the dates of the hard disc.  The servers are configured for RAID so the data is reasonably safe, but statistically I may be due a disc failure or several in the next 12 months.  Its more expense, but I'm starting to think that I probably need to invest in another network server.  Just as well we aren't going to be spending money on holidays this year ...