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Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#11

Post by quickthrower2 »

prawn wrote: post #7

I work with photos and videos and cannot comprehend downsizing to 2TB. Or even finding time to go through and selectively cull old footage. I shot a simple one-day drone-only vineyard job last week that generated 140GB, not including graded renders and photo edits afterwards. On any given day, I will have 5-7 external drives connected, plus a NAS box. There are another 15+ drives (2-5TB) in the drawer beside me. SSDs…

If you are doing it for a client (?) then you just need to back it up and charge them an appropriate fee. There is not much cognitive load as to whether it is worth keeping or not as the client decides.

With hobby stuff and especially family photos it becomes hard to decide whether to keep it all, spend time curating it, maybe down sizing it. If you can get all your memories in 2Tb or less it makes backup management way more easier in terms of disks and time taken to back it up etc.

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#12

Post by dmw_ng »

Currently sitting on 250gb of RAWs since October, at some point that will hopefully become 40gb or less. The last time this happened I batch converted everything to Adobe DNG, but support for that isn't great outside Lightroom. Is there some format with good compatibility somewhere between DNG/RAW and JPG that preserves dynamic range and white balance information? I think exposure and WB correction is pretty much the only functionality worth fighting to preserve. Keeping RAWs for long term personal archival seems silly

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#13

Post by rektide »

megous wrote: post #4

Not sure how are these nvme enclosures supposed to work. The problem is right in the picture. Samsung SSD bla bla 3.3V/3.3A = 11W and that's just for the SSD itself, the controller chip in the enclosure will also consume a lot of power at the advertised speeds. So you're looking at say 13W or so peak power consumption of the whole deal. Normal USB 3.0 port can do 4.5W. So sticking that contraption into such port will…

Peak power on these recent-ish high performance recent drive reviews shows 9w, but most drives peak consumption is 5W. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-990-pro-ssd-rev...

Absolutely some drives won't qualify, especially PCIe 5. But many will be fine. Also, PCIe 3 x4 is 4GBps or 32Gbps which isn't that far from saturating usb4 anyways, so it's not like we even can get drives running full tilt over USB at present. Many of these controllers probably top out at PCIe 3 or even less, if they don't support 40Gbps (most cheap-ish ones won't).

Hopefully we start seeing some usb-pd capable systems & drives. The want to plug in 2 or 4 drive 3.5" enterprise drive arrays to my laptop & have it just work. Even just a single 3.5" of power would be so helpful. And it'd mean you could alternatively be charging your phone well too, which is probably the more common everyday ask.

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#14

Post by prawn »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #11
prawn wrote: post #7

I work with photos and videos and cannot comprehend downsizing to 2TB. Or even finding time to go through and selectively cull old footage. I shot a simple one-day drone-only vineyard job last week that generated 140GB, not including graded renders and photo edits afterwards. On any given day, I will have 5-7 external drives connected, plus a NAS box. There are another 15+ drives (2-5TB) in the drawer beside me. SSDs…

If you are doing it for a client (?) then you just need to back it up and charge them an appropriate fee. There is not much cognitive load as to whether it is worth keeping or not as the client decides. With hobby stuff and especially family photos it becomes hard to decide whether to keep it all, spend time curating it, maybe down sizing it. If you can get all your memories in 2Tb or less it makes backup management…

Yes, usually shooting for a client: https://serio.com.au/projects/

I should probably just add a 10% line item for drives and archiving.

But also a good amount is speculative - shoot a location and then try to sell the content to various parties. Sometimes sell stuff a year or more after shooting it.

Keeping one copy isn’t onerous or expensive, but the mental baggage of shuffling around multiple copies gets a bit much.

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#17

Post by Aeolun »

mavu wrote: post #6

NO! I will keep adding an /archive folder to every PC I own and copy the complete contents of my previous /home/ folder into it, including an endless amount of recursive /archive folders. I will never look at any of those again. But Archeologists in the far future will find my data and it will revolutionize their understanding of our time.

I find it very pleasant to look through these folders and hope I’ve got everything this time. Cleaning it all up has been on my to-do list for the past 5 years or so :/

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#18

Post by 6581 »

crazygringo wrote: post #16
unfocused wrote: post #15

I still have some .mod, . S3m, .xm music files that predate mp3s :)

Can you explain what those extensions are? There was always .wav but I don't recognize any of those...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_(file_format)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3M_(file_format)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_(file_format)

Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

#20

Post by cocacola1 »

Aeolun wrote: post #17
mavu wrote: post #6

NO! I will keep adding an /archive folder to every PC I own and copy the complete contents of my previous /home/ folder into it, including an endless amount of recursive /archive folders. I will never look at any of those again. But Archeologists in the far future will find my data and it will revolutionize their understanding of our time.

I find it very pleasant to look through these folders and hope I’ve got everything this time. Cleaning it all up has been on my to-do list for the past 5 years or so :/

I think "cleaning it all up" will remain a perpetual todo item for all digital collectors.
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