Arcticterntalk.org

The blog of a travelling psychiatrist and football lover. Who happens to be a halfway decent photographer. Takes a cynical view of the world

Archive for the day “April 28, 2017”

28 Apr 2017
1 Comment

Zipcloud for data backup. My experiences . Avoid is my opinion 


Over the last 7 years on my IMAC I have accumulated 799 GB of data. Mostly photographs. A couple of years ago I was offered and signed up to Zipcloud paying a quite significant fee for unlimited data stored in some mythical cloud. The settings were straightforward and allowed me to set a large maximum file size and regular data uploads. In short I was confident that my data was happily sitting in its personal cloud.  Sadly my optimism was misplaced. The seagate hard drive eventually broke and I looked on zipcloud for my data. Zipcloud confirmed my data was there but when going to restore it magically it vanished.  

Cue multiple emails to customer service folks all with cute young sounding names, Hollie , Zara etc. All sent meaningless replies that came with a strong odour of copy and paste. Eventually a fraction of my data appeared in the restore panel, maybe 5%.  They were unable it seems or unwilling to find the rest.  I received a plethora of meaningless and unhelpful emails but no more data.  Apparently their development team would be in contact. Of course that never happened. 

In short I received a poor service for quite a lot of money. I would like to warn others into being comfortable with their data sitting in this cloud.  External hard drives are cheaper and more reliable . 

Luckily the data was all recoverable from the deceased hard drive.  And I have cancelled Zipcloud. 

Doing a quick search online this problem and others seem common with Zipcloud and my best advice based on my experience is to avoid them. 

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28 Apr 2017
5 Comments

Why exactly are dogs banned from so many places? Logic or a random decision? 


Since I got my first dog 6 months ago I have been perplexed and sometimes even amused by why dogs are banned from various places. This is in uk. However other countries take different views. Here in Nice in a decent hotel Boscolo Exedra I was firstly greeted this morning by a dog in the lift and then a few moments later found it sitting happily with its owners in the restaurant at breakfast. The dog sat in the same place , looked imploringly at its owners for food but was no trouble and I suspect many never realised he was there. This seems a familiar pattern in France. 

Let’s look at the UK. Traveling on the motorways one finds that dogs are not allowed inside motorway service stations. In the high street dogs are not allowed inside banks.  Dogs are not allowed into any hotel restaurant or bar . Dogs are not allowed into restaurants . Some pubs allow dogs in but stipulate where they can go.  This blanket ban does not of course apply to service dogs. 

To get the obvious out of the way, no one would expect to take an untrained or poorly behaved dog into these situations.  My dog Wolf is 7 months and would be fine. 

So what’s the logic and who makes the rules? Why can one country be so at odds with regulations in another? 

I put this out there as a discussion point . 

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