Waiting For Progress Bars To Be Full

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There was a time when I spent eight hours a day transferring footage from Beta SP, DV, DVcam, DVCpro and other tape formats to a digital format to be part of a media asset management system. A 63 minute tape would take at least 63 minutes to digitise. Back in those days we moved video files in real time.

When streamling live content I would wait for several hours for the program to end. I would watch basketball, curling and bobsledding, biathlon, but also NATO press conferences and more. You had to be there, ready to react if there was a problem. This was before YouTube streaming standardised things. I would set the akamai end points and start the encoders and recording, and then wait.

At the same time I would often have to wait for files to be transferred from the local computer to an FTP account. Sometimes this would add an hour or two to the shift.

Later on it was waiting for data to move from one drive to another. When I left for my walk today it said that I had about four hours left. Now it tells me that I have about two hours left. On a mac two hours means less than three hours and four hours means less than five. You add one hour to get a better estimate of time remaining.

On a mac there is a way to get a more granular view of how fast files are moving between drives. Right click and chose get info for the source, and the destination folders. You can then watch as data is moved between the two. When the transfer is finished you can check whether the byte number from Folder A is the same as for Folder B. If it is then you can assume that the transfer was a success. If it isn't you can spend time finding why there is a difference. In this scenario I am not deleting anything so I will check later.

What I am doing now is time consuming but once I finish moving data from this drive it will be much faster. It's slow because there are no duplicates yet. Once there are this process will go much faster. That's the stage I am impatient for.

## And Finally

Digitising footage or moving data from one drive to another is sometimes time consuming and boring, as is the case at the moment, but it's because most of the work was done over the last two weeks. Now it's about backing up that work. Tomorrow or Sunday I will start consolidating all that data and that will require me to be attentive again.

When I duplicate the eight terabyte drive I will use a Pi 4 for the task. I will set it to run and check it when it's done.