Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ex…
Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
71–80 of 142 posts
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#72I asked chat GPT-4 to write me a rust program that recurses all files in my external drives, generates a xxhash of each file, then inserts it into an RDF graph. That way I can scan for any files I don't have centralized before wiping out each older drive, and query for specific cases. It's also nice to recurse the old unimportant video files and re-encode them with ffmpeg vp9 or av1, opus, so they don't take up as mu…
I don't understand this idea of making an rdf - what value does the rdf provide? Is there a way to view a diff in terminal that makes it faster / more intuitive? I'm genuinely interested to do this or something like it for drives that are slightly out of sync with each other (yes I know, it's dumb but it happened).
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#73I 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…
I've had the same folder system for nearly a decade, which is a while for me, as I am young. Four main folders which are:
-Activity: social planning, ideas, games, holiday stuff, etc. in respective subfolders.
-Education: gradeschool, higher education, certificates, trainings, religious notes, etc. also organized by topic/semester as applicable.
-Management: responsibilities, work, taxes, health, family, housing, and all other boring but needful things.
-Media: mostly pictures and videos, organized by year. Some other stuff like journal entries.
I use the same system in my email and really any program that allows compartmentalization. I also keep other folders empty, like downloads, so I never have to guess where a file could be.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#74I asked chat GPT-4 to write me a rust program that recurses all files in my external drives, generates a xxhash of each file, then inserts it into an RDF graph. That way I can scan for any files I don't have centralized before wiping out each older drive, and query for specific cases. It's also nice to recurse the old unimportant video files and re-encode them with ffmpeg vp9 or av1, opus, so they don't take up as mu…
I don't understand this idea of making an rdf - what value does the rdf provide? Is there a way to view a diff in terminal that makes it faster / more intuitive? I'm genuinely interested to do this or something like it for drives that are slightly out of sync with each other (yes I know, it's dumb but it happened).
RDF is just an easy way to put everything into a graph, since file systems are stored in a hierarchy. You can use neo4j or whichever graph database, it doesn't have to be rdf. From there you can compare hashes that are in one file system but not in another, and do querying for constraints like largest files, folders with the most files, most recent files, etc.
If your file system is slightly out of sync, try out meld for an easy way to diff.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#75I 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 t…
It would nice if you could somehow deprioritize folders so that the files within them don't show up in the top N results in Spotlight, because yeah it's probably not useful for it to present source files from that one sprawling project I forked and tinkered with a couple years ago.
You can remove folders from spotlight indexing. I do it for all the source code folders.
I’ve also built a small tool to check whether some git repo is in sync with upstream, so it could be deleted: https://gitlab.com/leipert-projects/git-recon
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#76NO! 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.
Mine was worth like $9000 when I discovered an old Stellar Lumen crypto wallet with some coins on it I got during an airdrop back in the day. So hoarding paid off.
But then again - I have the same problem as OP. I have terabytes of photos which I should really cull but I can't get myself to do it because I'm a lazy fuck.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#77I 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 pe…
I think this would make for a great blog post. I'm sure many would be interested in more details around this, not just the technical details of how you go about digitizing 35 years of cassette tapes! but any other details you found significant around this project.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#78I 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 t…
It would nice if you could somehow deprioritize folders so that the files within them don't show up in the top N results in Spotlight, because yeah it's probably not useful for it to present source files from that one sprawling project I forked and tinkered with a couple years ago.
When I’m done with a project, I’ve taken to packing up these kinds of files into a disk image. That way, I can access them if I need to, but they don’t show up in search. There’s a risk that the image gets corrupted or isn’t readable on some future OS, but since these aren’t mission critical files, I’m not too worried about that.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#79Am I the only one who hates having to keep anything? As a kid I would go out of my way to not be in photos, and as an adult it's furniture and appliances. If it's important it's probably somewhere in my email, but wanting to deliberately store personal data locally or in the cloud makes my eyes roll. Who cares?
Your friends and family after you're gone. It'll alleviate some of their grief.
Re: Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
#80Nah, too many files have disappeared completely from the Internet, no one's interested in archiving and no, archive.org doesn't get everything.
Just keep buying bigger drives, copy the old stuff forward, keep like 3 sets and... who cares?
now running an always-online raid server? nah.