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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

#31

Post by Faark »

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 do look at mine. Rarely for something special / useful. Sure, i won't ever again need the drivers for that dell c600 that died 15 years ago. But just seeing that installer brought back fond memories! Randomly looking in there is fun every once in a while.

And with storage still growing decently, why should i delete anything? It's not like physical boxes of photos/etc that would take up more and more space every year.

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

#33

Post by basilgohar »

codeisawesome wrote: post #29
xmddmx wrote: post #25

Regarding 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.

I use Restic [0] for my personal backups and I use Backblaze for the backend, but AWS S3 and anything compatible (of which Backblaze is too) is also an option. I preencrypt all my data and use pass for managing my encryption password and the secrets.

[0] https://restic.net/

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

#35

Post by leviathan »

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 :/

> Cleaning it all up has been on my to-do list for the past 5 years

13 years and counting. But I’m sure I’ll eventually clean mine up

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

#36

Post by Bezod »

codeisawesome wrote: post #29
xmddmx wrote: post #25

Regarding 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.

For the past year I’ve been using Restic for personal devices as well as in a production server environment. Been very happy with it.

https://restic.net/

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

#37

Post by Baeocystin »

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 enjoy it, too. But I've got an active plan for cleaning up and managing my old folders- I'm going to wait until a computer can do it for me.

The same plan with regards to tagging my thousands of photos worked out great! Without me needing to anything else, auto-tagging has gotten good enough that I can find images that had been lost under some IMG_xxxx.JPG filename for years. I'm looking forward to being able to explore my history onion of folders at my leisure soon enough. :)

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

#38

Post by giantrobot »

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...

File formats for trackers; music sequencer programs. The files are very small because they just describe the beats/notes. Think MIDI files.

They were stupid easy to trade over IRC on dial-up because they were so small.

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

#39

Post by codeisawesome »

basilgohar wrote: post #33
codeisawesome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Restic [0] for my personal backups and I use Backblaze for the backend, but AWS S3 and anything compatible (of which Backblaze is too) is also an option. I preencrypt all my data and use pass for managing my encryption password and the secrets. [0] https://restic.net/

Looks great, thanks!

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

#40

Post by lucb1e »

xmddmx wrote: post #25

Regarding 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.

I always find it interesting to compare 4TB/month pricing against buying N 4TB hard drives yourself, where N is the desired redundancy. Typically, you could buy a fresh set of hard drives 2-3x per year for the "standard" (they don't even call it "premium") storage tier. A normal drive lasts 5 years: go figure. (The markup was about double ten years ago, so it has gotten more competitive already.)

Of course, that's not entirely apples to apples because they save you labor time, but I find it an interesting baseline comparison, also because their labor is divided over a hundred thousand customers and approximates to zero per customer.

Another thing people tend to forget is that it's a backup copy, not your only. You don't need the premium storage if you keep the original copy around anyway and the odds of 3 unrelated drives (1 at home, 2 off-site) dying at the same time are probably better than you getting into a car crash this year. I did have 2 die at the same time: same make and model, nearly identical serial numbers, surprise: same crash date and crash behavior (few KB/s sequential read speeds for a while, but strangely no data was corrupted, before entirely crashing).

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