I took up bird photography about 3 years ago. I have 400,000+ RAW photos in Lightroom on over a dozen 2 TB SSDs. It's not so much hoarding as it just takes effort to go through and decide what to keep and what to delete. I shoot bursts so it adds up really fast. I could probably get by with 10-20% of the storage if I could just keep up with the pruning.
Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#22I did eventually throw out my floppy discs and a couple of years ago I finally scrapped my windows 98 PC after transferring files off the hard drive.
I still have data going back to around 95 though, and I like that. Pictures and chat logs from way back when I first met my wife. Old games I played as a teen. Some of the code I wrote way back when I was first learning and some of my first open source contributions.
I did lose a lot along the way, though. Sometimes I wish I could still see some of that earliest stuff. And things that have been lost on the ephemeral 'net - old BBS discussions, usenet topics, my teenage livejournal, etc. that I didn't copy and save.
The tough part is that it gets hard to manage.
While I do pull forward the most important stuff each time I get a new PC, a lot of the rest is sitting in old backup formats from various backup software that I might not even be able to restore anymore. It's always nice when I think of something I used to have and can go dig it out of one of those backups, but I don't know that I will always be able to.
And it can be really hard to find something. I've tried various organizational schemes over the years, but that just means that some things are organized one way and some are organized another, and it's even more difficult to find things. I suppose I should go through and re-organize everything into one consistent standard structure, but that's what I've always done before and it just becomes like the XKCD about adding yet another standard.
Anyway, the digital clutter still works well enough for me. It's sort of a cozy old home filled with sentimental things instead of a sterile empty monastic cell.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#23welcome to the club
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#24Thank you for reminding me that I need to duplicate my 15 TB storage, just in case.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#25Regarding Arq backup: if you are worried about using a proprietary (enrypted) and closed-source backup format in case the company were to go under, they have an open source command-line restore tool:
https://github.com/arqbackup/arq_restore
I've been using Arq for years, but I need to look into the "Glacier Deep Archive" format which is about 1/20th the cost of the fastest storage class.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#26NO! 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 feel so known right now. I'm glad I found my people.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#27NO! 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.
This is me and my Downloads folder. Apps that will never run again. Fonts I outgrew.
My Downloads folder is one of the few that actually is clean. In fact, it's usually empty. Everything downloaded is downloaded for a reason, and gets moved to the right spot as soon as the download is complete.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#28Is Arq open source? I have a similar problem set but I don’t want to use a closed source product managing my encryption and uploads.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#29Regarding Arq backup: if you are worried about using a proprietary (enrypted) and closed-source backup format in case the company were to go under, they have an open source command-line restore tool: https://github.com/arqbackup/arq_restore I've been using Arq for years, but I need to look into the "Glacier Deep Archive" format which is about 1/20th the cost of the fastest storage class.
What’s the best open source file and backup managemen tool that can upload to AWS and GCP cloud storage, with integrity checking and with pre-upload encryption? I don’t want to start writing one only to discover a powerful thing that already exists in the OSS community and is trusted.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Yes, usually shooting for a client
I don't think this "I [...] cannot comprehend downsizing to 2TB" in the top-level comment is really a useful comparison to the article (or rest of the thread) if you're talking about data that is from clients; not your own. Of course you can't "comprehend" that if it's not-very-compressible sensor data that you need to keep on someone else's behalf or for your business (the speculative part, that's a business investment).