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Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

paulstamatiou.com

41–50 of 142 posts

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unlike MIDI, tracker files also contain the samples used.

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

#43
post #30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specul…

Fair point, but my main initial comparison was of photographer versus photographer/videographer in the clutter/hoarding sense. I would have a lot more than 2TB that is just personal holiday content over the years. The video content from one camera on one holiday last year is 290GB and I wouldn't want to cull much of it because unlike a traditional camera on the ground, there's nothing out of focus, not 10+ shots trying to get everyone unblinking, etc.

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

#44
" I had gigabit ethernet but that doesn’t matter, these spinning disks are barely faster than 100MB/s for sequential read even with a RAID setup."

Umm doesn't gigabit ethernet basically give you a max of 125MB/s anyways? And I was seeing transfer rates of sequential read from 7200rpm SATA drives greater than that even 8 years ago...

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

#45
post #31
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 yea…

Last year I was digging through my archive and found my old Gom player installation folder from ~2011 or so and just got a blashback of when I modded the interphase of it to be Protoss themed when I would watch GSL streams on it!

Indeed the emotional value of said sometimes silly things can't be understated

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

#48
I recently went through 35 years worth of cassette tapes to pull off old songs I had written as a teenager and songs I played with bands I was in over the years. I’m so glad I saved it all to digitize. (And glad I finally got around to it.) I found one song of a band practice from before our band had a drummer or bass player. It was just me on keys, the guitarist and the singer. The guitarist is now dead. We never performed that song live anywhere as we ended up cutting it from our set because it was just a little outside of our style. I was able to bring it into Logic, clean up the tape noise and add a drum track, just to see what it would have sounded like. It let’s me relive a moment of my life in a way that just a simple memory couldn’t. I also found recordings of shows we played. So glad I didn’t throw any of it out. (And yes, some of it was terrible. I didn’t digitize those parts.)

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

#49
I bias towards keep rather than discard both because cost is low and because the tools are getting better. About 20 years ago I even realized I don't need to discard the blurry pictures because someday they might be recoverable or otherwise useful (that day is probably here).

And as personal (local) search gets better with smarter systems it may be that future codebases will surface interesting insights or memories of some long ago event or activity as it can do with photos today.

However when my parents pass on I will discard all the landscape photos and and all the photos of long dead relatives I only met as a kid and don't even remember. Some of those are quite meaningful to my mum and dad, but are meaningless to me.

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

#50
I know this is talking about large files like photos and videos.

And I get the whole storage is cheap line of thinking.

But there’s actually a different problem outside of photos, etc. Simply, index pollution.

I have lots of little projects on my machine. I have lots of open source code on my machine. And, while I can’t think of any specific examples, there are areas of search on that, dare I accidentally trip into that hole, are just filled with detritus and garbage.

My Spotlight is gorged with false positives for some terms. And I know that I have searched for things that I know I have, but unable to locate, or at least certainly not easily, because I was searching “wrong”.

Indexing provides lightning fast access to everything I don’t want to see.

Mind not much I plan to do about it. I guess I can take some “never again“ stuff, put them on an external drive, and tell Spotlight to ignore it.

That said also, my phone is full. About 2g free. Mostly photos and videos. Mostly my cats. Solution is simple. Need a bigger phone.

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