Pie making day...

I have a bunch of photos that I keep meaning to post, so I thought that I'd start with some from our pie making day. For the last 3 years, Mom and I (and now Grandma) have been making pies with the apples that Randy and I pick from Blake's. I absolutely love this day! I love spending time with my mom, I love learning a new skill that I don't really know much about and it's just fun to spend time together doing this.

This year, we had enough apples to make 3 pies, plus an apple crumble. Grandma taught us how to make a lattice top on one of them, which was fun to do, but I think we all decided that the pies with the full crust on top taste better.

My mom's Betty Crocker cookbook from 30+ years ago that I love looking at.

No store-bought dough for us, thank you very much.

And no post would be complete without a pregnancy picture (this was from Oct. 25).

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Something else I wanted to mention: I've been doing a lot of research lately about online digital back-up solutions for my pictures and files. I take so many pictures that I can't keep them on my computer because I don't have the memory for it. I only store the current year's photos in iphoto and then keeping everything else on my external hard drive (along with the current years photos too).

The problem with this? Hard drives fail all of the time. And if mine died out, I don't have any other back-ups of my pictures. I used to burn a copy of my pictures on disk and somewhere along the way, I got out of the habit of doing this. Plus, they really need to be stored offsite in order to keep them safe in an emergency.

I've looked all around and finally found an affordable solution. Mozy.com allows you to upload unlimited amounts of files onto their servers and then lets you retrieve them at any time. The best part? The cost is only $4.95 a month! Plus, I found an online coupon code for 15% off and since I paid for a year in full, I got 1 month free. So for a little over $45 a year, all of my files will be safe and secure.

As far as I can tell, there are only a couple of downsides to this system. The first is that the initial upload is taking forever. But that's because I am uploading 26,406 files (127.2 gb)! That's a lot of stuff. But it's all of our pictures that I've take digitally since 2005, plus some of my dad's photos, golf outing files and our entire itunes library. I started my upload on Friday afternoon and as of right now (Sunday night), it's only uploaded 20% of my files.

The only other drawback is that when the backups run I will have to make sure that the external hard drive is plugged into the laptop (I usually only do that when I need to use it). Mozy will automatically check the computer for new files nightly or whenever I direct it to. And if the external hard drive isn't plugged in, Mozy will think that I've deleted the files and delete them from their system after 30 days. Which would be awful, especially since this upload is taking so long to complete.

Anyways - just wanted to share this system with anyone else who might need to do something like this. However you decide to do it, make sure your photos are safely backed up!