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Time for a digital spring cleaning?

wct097

NPD Club President 2021-2022
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP
I'm thinking it's about time to go through all of my digital "stuff" and do some spring cleaning, archiving to DVD, and general cleanup.

Between my laptop & desktop, I think I'm using the following space:

Pictures & Video: 80gb
Documents: 15gb
Software ISOs: 72gb
Backups/archives of phones, laptops, family computers: 32gb
Virtual Machines: 425gb (not including a 250gb P2V backup of an old laptop)

My Dropbox folder has swollen to almost 25gb. I have my 2tb Apple Time Capsule split into 2 1tb partitions for Time Machine backups and NAS backups, plus a 1tb USB drive and a 320gb usb drive attached. I also have a 1.5tb USB 3.0 drive that I use as a redundant backup.

I need to spend some time doing through everything, deleting & archiving photos. In the past I didn't do a good job of sorting through photos to delete the blurry and bad ones. I also need to do a better job at cataloging them. I'm kind of a digital packrat. I'm thinking I should archive some to DVD and delete them from my magnetic drives to free up space and make it easier to find stuff I still care about.

I'm really not using but two of my VMs. I'm thinking I'll probably delete a couple of those. One of the big ones could probably be cleaned up a bit.

I also have a bunch of redundant local backups that could be streamlined.

It might be a good excuse to buy a new, larger USB drive to use as a target for backups before I start deleting anything.

This looks pretty cost effective:
Amazon.com WD My Book 4 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup Computers Accessories
 

pirranah

pierced dingaling
VIP
I clean my stuff monthly it seems. It's not a big deal though between phone and a 1tb HD
 

miwico

Stalker of Brock
VIP
I'm terribly disorganized electronically. I have been using onedrive to attempt to put all my eggs in one basket at least. Hopefully I don't get hacked. :jump:
 

wct097

NPD Club President 2021-2022
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP
About the best I do on a regular basis is clean out my "camera uploads" in Dropbox.

One thing I need to stop doing, however, is sticking my unencrypted tax documents in Dropbox. I really need to create a couple of Truecrypt volumes to store sensitive docs in. Currently I have several years of tax docs and all of my NFA docs & trust stored unencrypted in Dropbox.
 

miwico

Stalker of Brock
VIP
Even simple shit like naming folders properly is difficult. I find that some things are difficult to categorize. Some smart fawker could make billions if there was a program that could do it all automatically.
 

wct097

NPD Club President 2021-2022
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP
I was just thinking about that too. I think the ideal way of storing photos and even documents would be to store them in some sort of repository or database with a UI that allows you to tag photos with keywords, dates, and locations.

For example, if I have a picture that was taken of my wife and I and a coworker at a software conference in Boca Raton, I may want to tag it with the names of everyone in the photo, the location, the term "work", the name of the conference, etc. Then I can search on any of those terms or the date to find it later.

I think to do it right you'd need to also have it cloud enabled so that you can access the pictures on multiple devices and through the web. I have a feeling that the service already exists. Photobucket, Instagram, etc.
 

Brock

VIP
Ultra-Premium
I'm thinking it's about time to go through all of my digital "stuff" and do some spring cleaning, archiving to DVD, and general cleanup.

Between my laptop & desktop, I think I'm using the following space:

Pictures & Video: 80gb
Documents: 15gb
Software ISOs: 72gb
Backups/archives of phones, laptops, family computers: 32gb
Virtual Machines: 425gb (not including a 250gb P2V backup of an old laptop)

My Dropbox folder has swollen to almost 25gb. I have my 2tb Apple Time Capsule split into 2 1tb partitions for Time Machine backups and NAS backups, plus a 1tb USB drive and a 320gb usb drive attached. I also have a 1.5tb USB 3.0 drive that I use as a redundant backup.

I need to spend some time doing through everything, deleting & archiving photos. In the past I didn't do a good job of sorting through photos to delete the blurry and bad ones. I also need to do a better job at cataloging them. I'm kind of a digital packrat. I'm thinking I should archive some to DVD and delete them from my magnetic drives to free up space and make it easier to find stuff I still care about.

I'm really not using but two of my VMs. I'm thinking I'll probably delete a couple of those. One of the big ones could probably be cleaned up a bit.

I also have a bunch of redundant local backups that could be streamlined.

It might be a good excuse to buy a new, larger USB drive to use as a target for backups before I start deleting anything.

This looks pretty cost effective:
Amazon.com WD My Book 4 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup Computers Accessories
 

themonk

ex-monk.
VIP
I was just thinking about that too. I think the ideal way of storing photos and even documents would be to store them in some sort of repository or database with a UI that allows you to tag photos with keywords, dates, and locations.

For example, if I have a picture that was taken of my wife and I and a coworker at a software conference in Boca Raton, I may want to tag it with the names of everyone in the photo, the location, the term "work", the name of the conference, etc. Then I can search on any of those terms or the date to find it later.

I think to do it right you'd need to also have it cloud enabled so that you can access the pictures on multiple devices and through the web. I have a feeling that the service already exists. Photobucket, Instagram, etc.
Ever try picasa?
 

SAD

Wants $4.50 Gas
VIP
Even simple shit like naming folders properly is difficult. I find that some things are difficult to categorize. Some smart fawker could make billions if there was a program that could do it all automatically.
there is. but it's not for consumers.

I was just thinking about that too. I think the ideal way of storing photos and even documents would be to store them in some sort of repository or database with a UI that allows you to tag photos with keywords, dates, and locations.

For example, if I have a picture that was taken of my wife and I and a coworker at a software conference in Boca Raton, I may want to tag it with the names of everyone in the photo, the location, the term "work", the name of the conference, etc. Then I can search on any of those terms or the date to find it later.

I think to do it right you'd need to also have it cloud enabled so that you can access the pictures on multiple devices and through the web. I have a feeling that the service already exists. Photobucket, Instagram, etc.
hehe. Welcome to 1996!
 

wct097

NPD Club President 2021-2022
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP
Samsung HDD division is owned by Seagate. :shush:
Pass.

I'm actually thinking about holding out for a year or so and building a proper rack mounted NAS once I have a proper network closet.
 

Justin

Damn.
VIP
Honestly I don't trust any of these newer >2TB drives, seems they are just racing to keep ahead of the SSD invasion and throwing reliability to the wind. Plus just having too much damn data on one drive seems risky. :shrug:
 
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wct097

NPD Club President 2021-2022
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP
Agreed, but it really depends on your use-case. I have a number of USB drives plugged into my Time Capsule for use as NAS. I mainly only use them for backup, not as working storage. I don't see USB drives as a viable working storage. When it comes to working storage in my PC, I use RAID1. That RAID array, in my workstation, houses a nightly image backup of the boot drive which takes up a good amount of space.
 
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