The question I was asked at Toastmasters this week: is speed more important than accuracy?
I argue that there is a time for each. And it’s expensive, or takes a lot of practice and preparation, to have both at once. Speed, cost, quality — pick two.
But reflecting on many years of studying and doing software development, and also practicing music – I have a suggestion: go slow first, build the foundation of accuracy, then let the speed come naturally over time.
Fellow speech club members, Toastmasters — the question that I was asked is, “Is speed more important than accuracy? Give an example.”
This is an interesting question. I think there is a time for speed and a time for accuracy, and it’s very challenging to have both at the same time.
There’s a famous saying that in business you can pick speed, low cost, or good quality — but you can only pick two of the three. It’s very hard to find a business that will do good quality, very quickly, for a low cost. It comes down to the trade-offs between the different goals.
If you want to go really fast and do something quickly, it’s likely that you may miss something in your consideration, or forget to think about certain parts of it. But again, if you want to do something really accurately, it’s hard to do that fast.
But as a musician, I notice that if I practice playing piano a lot, I can eventually play a song quickly — at very high speed, like a Mozart sonata or something like that — and I’ll be able to play it very quickly, also with high accuracy. But that’s only if I practice a lot: first going slowly, and then gradually speeding it up over time, working on all the different pieces and putting them all together.
Ever worry about losing access to your Google Drive? In this video, Geoff from geoffmobile.com shares exactly how he backed up his entire 280GB Google Drive onto two external hard drives.
I’ll walk you through:
✅ Why Google Takeout beats manually copying files one by one
✅ The export settings that actually matter (so you don’t miss anything)
✅ Why your downloaded files won’t open — and how the free tool 7-Zip fixes that
✅ How I built a searchable index with Python + Gemini so I never have to dig through giant zip files again
✅ My two-drive backup strategy, so a single hard drive failure never costs me my data
How to Back Up Your Google Drive to a Local Hard Drive
If you’ve been using Google Drive for years — especially if you’re on one of the paid plans with hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes stored — it’s worth keeping a local backup. Accounts can get locked or suspended for all sorts of reasons, and you don’t want your only copy of everything disappearing along with your Google account.
Here’s how I backed up my entire Google Drive (about 280 GB) onto two external hard drives, and how you can do the same.
Step 1: Get a couple of external drives
I picked up two 2 TB hard drives from Best Buy, about $174 CAD each. Keeping two copies means that if one drive fails, you’ve still got the other — the odds of both dying at once are pretty low. If your Google Drive is bigger than mine, size up accordingly; 5 TB or 7 TB drives aren’t unreasonable if you’ve got a lot of data.
Step 2: Export with Google Takeout instead of copying files manually
Rather than copying files one at a time, use Google Takeout — Google’s built-in tool for exporting your account data. Go to Google Takeout, sign in, click “unselect all,” then check just Google Drive. In the advanced options, make sure “include uploaded files” and “include extra file info” are both checked so nothing gets left out.
You’ll also pick a zip file size. A zip file is just an archive — a way of bundling many files together into one compressed package, which is much easier to download than thousands of individual files. Takeout will split your export into multiple zip files once you hit that size limit, so if your connection is fast, choose the largest option available (I used 50 GB per file) to end up with fewer, bigger archives.
Step 3: Install 7-Zip to actually open the files
Here’s the part that trips people up: these zip files won’t open normally through Windows Explorer or on a Mac — you’ll likely get an “invalid file” error. Windows 11’s built-in tools just can’t handle archives this large.
You’ll need 7-Zip, a free, open-source program for opening and managing zip files. Only get it from the official source (7-zip.org), or better yet, install it through winget — the Windows Package Manager, a built-in Windows tool for installing software from a trusted source. Fake “7-Zip” downloads floating around online are a common way people end up with malware, so it’s worth being careful here.
Once installed, open 7zFM.exe (the 7-Zip File Manager) to browse through the archives Takeout gave you.
Step 4: Build an index so you can find things later
With potentially hundreds of gigabytes split across dozens of zip files, tracking down one specific document later is a real problem. My fix: build an index — essentially a spreadsheet listing every file name, its folder path, and which zip archive it lives in.
I used Gemini to help write a Python script that scans through all the zip files and dumps that information into a CSV file — a plain-text spreadsheet format you can open in Excel. Now I can search the index first, find exactly which archive has the file I need, and pull out just that one file instead of unpacking an entire 50 GB zip to find a single PDF. I’ve shared the script on my GitHub.
Step 5: Duplicate it
Once everything’s downloaded to one drive, copy the whole folder over to the second drive so you end up with two identical backups. It’s worth setting a reminder to redo this every few months so your backup doesn’t get too stale.
That’s the whole process — a bit of setup, but it means your files are safe even if something goes wrong with your Google account. Questions? Drop them in the comments.
Piano – Andrew
Bass – George
Drums – Francesco
Guitar – Robin
Tenor Saxophone and Vocals (Songs 3,5,9,11) – Roly
Tenor Saxophone – Neil
Set list:
00:00 Song 1 – Beautiful Love by Victor Young and Wayne King and Song 2 – Doxy by Sonny Rollins
09:52 Song 3 – How High the Moon by Morgan Lewis/Nancy Hamilton
14:40 Song 4 – Ceora by Lee Morgan
19:54 Song 5 – All of Me by Seymour Simons and Gerald Marks
24:11 Song 6 – Peace by Horace Silver
28:15 Song 7 – Some Day My Prince Will Come by Frank Churchill/Larry Morey – audio only
32:47 Song 8 – Oleo by Sonny Rollins – audio only
36:36 Song 9 – The Girl from Ipanema by Antonio Carlos Jobim
42:03 Song 10 – In Walked Bud by Thelonius Monk
47:13 Song 11 – Have You Met Miss Jones? by Richard Rogers/Lorenz Hart
51:47 Song 12 – Triste by Antonio Carlos Jobim
56:18 Song 13 – Simone by Frank Foster
01:00:20 Song 14 – Blues for Alice by Charlie Parker
01:03:28 Song 15 – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach
01:08:39 Song 16 – Mr. P.C. by John Coltrane
01:12:49 Song 17 – St Thomas by Sonny Rollins
Camera: Vuze XR – 5.7K VR 180 upscaled to 8K. Audio: Zoom H2n in Spatial audio mode, rendered to stereo in Reaper using Ambisonic Toolkit. Audio processed in Audacity. Video edited in Shotcut.
Here’s a recording of Geoff Peters from geoffmobile.com performing “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson on vocals and piano, live at an open mic night at Pleasant Mountain Music in Vancouver BC Canada.
“Steppin’ Out” is a song by English musician Joe Jackson, originally included on his 1982 album Night and Day. The song was inspired by Jackson’s time in New York City.
Geoff’s arrangement is influenced both by the Joe Jackson original, as well as Kurt Elling’s vocal jazz cover of “Steppin’ Out” from his Grammy-nominated album “The Gate” (2011).
For more information about Pleasant Mountain Music in Vancouver BC Canada, please visit pleasantmountainmusic.ca
Recorded at Pleasant Mountain Music on June 7th 2026.
Technical notes:
8K VR 180 video (originally from a 5.7K master from Vuze XR).
Video edited in Shotcut.
4 channel Audio recorded from Zoom H2n in Spatial Audio mode, rendered to stereo in Reaper using Ambisonic Toolkit, and mastered in Audacity. Compressor used: MCompressor. Limiter used: W1 Limiter by George Yohng (thank you George!).
Audio uploaded in uncompressed WAV format within MOV container to Youtube to preserve quality as much as possible.
For fellow Canadians, you may be looking for ways to save on the cost of gas. Chevron has a rewards program called Journie and they offer discounts and a points system. In addition Chevron has good quality gas designated as “Top Tier” that is recommended by car brands like Kia for their hybrids.
If you’d like a one time 2 cents per litre discount on gas through the Chevron Gas referral program, feel free to use my referral code to save 2¢/L on your next fill-up at Chevron when you sign up for Journie Rewards here:
Hi everyone, this is Geoff from geoffmobile.com. Hope you’re having a fantastic day!
I know with all the world events going on right now, the cost of gas is on everyone’s mind. If you have a gasoline-powered vehicle, you may be wondering how you can save some money.
Well, good news for Canadians! If you are in Canada and you have a Chevron gas station nearby, you may not know this, but Chevron has a rewards program called Journie. They offer discounts and a point system. In addition, I like Chevron because it has good quality gas, which is designated as “Top Tier” — a standard recommended by car brands like Kia for their hybrids.
If you’d like a one-time 2 cents per liter discount on gas through the Chevron Journie program, feel free to use my referral code in the video description below. You’ll save 2 cents a liter on your next fill-up at Chevron when you sign up for the Journie Rewards app. They also give you various discounts after you achieve certain milestones or earn points.
Another way you can save money is by linking your Air Canada Aeroplan number to your Journie account — they will then give you an extra 75 points, which you can redeem for gas discounts.
Please check out the Journie app via the link below and let me know how it goes. If you sign up and get your discount, I hope that helps you save a bit of money during this difficult time. Thank you very much — don’t forget to subscribe, and have a great day!
