A Rainy Day

This morning it rained and this afternoon I fled from noise pollution. I had planned to write a blog post this morning but inspiration failed to come. I was distracted because I don't know whether it is the USB ports on a PI 5 that have failed or if it is a drive or two that have failed after being plugged in for several weeks in a row without being turned off. The issue is with external drives.

I moved two hundred and thirty three gigabytes of audiobooks from one drive to another and now I am in the process of moving several years of photos from one drive to another. This drive will then feed audiobookshelf and Nextcloud. I am undecided as to whether it will also feed Photoprism or not. Nextcloud and Audiobookshelf have proved to be the more interesting the apps I have experimented with in recent weeks.

I noticed a fault this morning, which is why I was distracted. For some reason the drive is either failing after being on non-stop for weeks in a row, or the Pi5 has faulty USB ports.I would have tested the drive on a mac to see whether I have the same issue but I am waiting for several hundred gigabytes to be moved from one drive to another. Once the move has been made I can determine what the issue is.

At the moment I am tempted to move Nextcloud and Audiobookshelf to a Pi4 8GB, especially if the USB ports on the Pi5 have failed after a relatively short amount of use. I hope that it is not the drive that has failed because it might be harder to recover some data. Paradoxically I will have lost the three most recent years.

## And Finally

It's because of my experimentation that I have not deleted the photos from Google Photos, Flickr and other places. Once I know that my solutions are reliable I will be destructive about which services I am retiring and which ones I am keeping.