Category: Google

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Tackling the… Whatever

To recap, at the end of yesterday’s instalment I mentioned how I had realised that the photos I was carefully downloading to a folder I had created on my hard drive, and then deleting from Google Photos to create space on my Google Drive, were being grabbed back onto Google Drive overnight by the naughty Data Pixies (or perhaps I should call them the Google Gnomes, or Data Demons?) Anyway, every day I was returning to find the inevitable messages about my cloud space being 99% full.

So I started looking into Windows 10’s ‘Backup and sync’ feature, which told me that I could select the folders which I wanted to be backed up to the cloud – which was news to me, because I didn’t realise anything was being automatically up to anywhere from my computer. I’m very old school in that I assume it’s my personal responsibility to arrange to keep my important files backed up somewhere, as was drilled into me many decades ago, before the idea arose that computers could ever be accessed directly by mere mortals who needed protection from their own folly and carelessness.

With some effort (to be honest, I can’t remember exactly how I did it, and just had to Google it again, when I discovered that I needed to click on the icon at the bottom right of the screen near the volume/mute symbol, and then go to Preferences, though I’m sure that’s not how it happened last time), I came to a window with the header: ‘Choose folders to continuously back up to Google Drive’ and underneath, the names of three folders with tick boxes next to them: ‘Desktop’, ‘Documents’ and ‘Pictures’. I unticked them, rubbed my hands with glee, and deleted some more files, till I got down to roughly 10GB again.

Problem solved? Not exactly.

Next day, there it was again. Google Drive 99% full, 15GB of 15GB used. ‘If you run out of space you won’t be able to upload files or send or receive emails. Delete some files or upgrade your storage.’

When I listed the files in descending order of size, I saw on the list not only photos which had been bounced back and forth, but also a large number of music files and some Powerpoint presentations from an art history course I did about five years ago. In a previous purge, a year or two ago, when I was going through and deleting large emails, I had downloaded them and hidden them safely in a folder named ‘art stuff’, located on… wait for it…  the desktop. .

Every day I go into the ‘Desktop’ folder on Google Drive, and delete some more files – but there’s a limit to how many I can select at a time without causing the computer to seize up completely. I swear I can hear the data crackling back and forth. It is a huge job, it is mind-numbing and where the f…heck is it filling up from now?

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Wenesday Morning

I was going to go to the shop, but slept in and didn’t get up till half past seven, so decided to skip my exercise routine and get dressed straight away. But when I looked at the shopping list, I thought: I’m not desperate for any of these things, I haven’t got enough milk to last the day but I’ve got some long-life in the cupboard, and whatever else I need will depend on what I’m going to eat over the next few days, and I can’t think about planning what I’m going to eat so I’ll leave it till tomorrow – except tomorrow I have to go to the doctor’s for half past eight to get a blood test to check on how my cholesterol’s doing – so better not have anything too cheesy for dinner tonight – and I guess I can go to the shop after the doctor’s, it will be a bit later than usual but hopefully not too busy.

But what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or the next few days? What’s in the freezer? It’s full of plastic boxes, and since the start of the year I’ve been making a list of what’s in there and tallies to tick things off, but there are no labels on the boxes so I have to guess. Because on alternate Saturdays (I have takeaway on the others) I make a casserole in the slow cooker, and put three quarters of it into plastic boxes and freeze them. But which is which? They look pretty much the same. This one has cannellini beans, I think that’s from before the time I started writing them down, and it’s either lamb hotpot or belly pork in cider. It’ll do.

The sun is shining and the dead heads of the hydrangea are looking at me through the window, the ones I didn’t cut back in the autumn. If I cut them now, will I cut off the new shoots as well so it doesn’t flower?

What to do? Make a cup of coffee, prepare porridge and put it in the microwave ready for later, and put away the things from the drainer because they must be dry by now. Like any other day. Then I’ll go on the computer and delete some more files, because the backup from the phone will be on there by now, or will be as soon as the phone’s connected to the wifi. And write? Or do I feel too shit to share?

When I get upstairs I remember I need to do the washing today, and it’s sunny, so I sit on the bed and think – what needs to go in and what am I going to forget and kick myself about later? Two pairs of ripped jeans should be in the bin, I forgot them last week and again today because the bin men have already gone.

Groundhog day all over again. Spring is coming, but what changes? At least I’m up and dressed.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 2 of …?

I think I might have solved the mystery of my magic-porridge-pot always-full Google drive.

I spent a lot of time on Sunday downloading photos to my hard drive and deleting emails from my Gmail account, and got the drive down to 75% full, only to get up yesterday and find that, once again, Google was screaming at me that my storage was 99% full and I needed to buy more space.

When I logged onto my Google Drive it showed me the standard folders I always have: Accounts, Crafts, mp3 files, Meditation and Poetry , with no ‘loose’ files (I sorted all those out ages ago, and only save things into those folders). But when I clicked on the link to ‘list files in descending size order’ I was shocked to find screen after screen full of other files, including lots of photos which I knew for a fact I’d deleted the day before. I clicked on one, and in a panel on the right of the screen titled ‘details’ I found out it was in a folder called ‘Huawei  P20 Lite’ (which is the name of my phone) – which didn’t appear in the list of folders I could see.

What had happened (I surmised) was that it had noticed that there was some space available on my Google drive, and decided to fill it by backing up everything from my phone.

I then had a look at the space on my phone, and found that I’d used 57GB out of a total of 64GB, of which 25GB was photos. I had photos on there from when I got this phone – in August 2018, and all the ones I’d taken since – which is a rather a lot. So, I spent most of yesterday morning deleting (again) files from my Google drive, and also deleting the older ones from my phone.

Now, you might ask yourself – as I asked myself – what possible justification can there be for supplying 15GB of free cloud space to back up a device which has up to 64GB capacity? – but a moment’s thought shows there’s a perfectly rational explanation, centred round that word ‘Free’ – Google is quite happy to supply me with more cloud space to backup my data, at £16/year for another 85GB. Now, admittedly that’s not a huge expense, but bear in mind that I already have over four times as much unoccupied space as that on the 1 Terabyte hard drive which came with my PC.

Not only that, but as I type this, my server has been merrily chugging away backing up the data from  my phone onto my Google drive yet again, and has just informed me that my storage has now gone from 77% to 88% full, so that soon I won’t be able to send or receive emails, and I might like to consider buying some more…

I mention all this partly because it took up a lot of yesterday, but also because it seems like a good metaphor… to be continued.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 1 of …?

My Google Drive is permanently full, and has been for years (literally, in the literal sense, years). Every so often I purge some files, photos or emails and somehow it stumbles on, but I opened a new gmail account – I think it was in 2017 – which is what I mostly use for email these days. However, I still have the old one as there are people and organisations who have that as my email address (like the yahoo email which I’ve had for over twenty years to the best of my knowledge and which still gets lots of emails every day, but I don’t want to close because some contacts only have that address).

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued