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Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes

paulstamatiou.com

91–100 of 142 posts

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

#91

> I ended up deciding to get a small, simple external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure. See this is the problem with the whole minimalism/decluttering/etc. movements: half the time they are so entrenched in consumerism that they authentically believe that buying this new thing will solve their clutter problem. The author goes on to buy a new cloud storage service that is "a backup power tool for advanced users". And spends…

From the outside it looks like shaving the yak if you ask me. It's easy to create the false sense that you are being productive / clean stuff up but ... are you really?

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

#92
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 just dd my old drive onto my new drive.

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

#93

> I ended up deciding to get a small, simple external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure. See this is the problem with the whole minimalism/decluttering/etc. movements: half the time they are so entrenched in consumerism that they authentically believe that buying this new thing will solve their clutter problem. The author goes on to buy a new cloud storage service that is "a backup power tool for advanced users". And spends…

I get you point, but I'd still argue that SSD+Arq is a lot simpler than any NAS setup. Wether the migration is worth it is up to personal preference I guess, but there's certainly a risk of spending more time and money in the end.

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

#94

> I ended up deciding to get a small, simple external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure. See this is the problem with the whole minimalism/decluttering/etc. movements: half the time they are so entrenched in consumerism that they authentically believe that buying this new thing will solve their clutter problem. The author goes on to buy a new cloud storage service that is "a backup power tool for advanced users". And spends…

This was my first thought when I finished reading the article. So he talks about terabytes on terabytes, and how much work all that was... then goes to buy terabytes of ssd enclosure?!

Then backs it up to the cloud?

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

#95
I work with a vast collection of unprocessed photographs, which takes up about 6 terabytes of storage space on my 4-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device - a DS418. Despite being limited to 1 GbE speeds, the process of loading each of the raw images, which are around 60-70 MB in size, only takes half a second. I occasionally use the smb multichannel flag to improve my bandwidth when connecting to my Mac through two gigabit USB-C Ethernet adapters, but it doesn't make much of a difference. Editing over Wi-Fi using my Wi-Fi 6 connection, which usually runs at 700 Mbit/s, is also not an issue. Although having a 10 GbE connection would be nice, it is not a priority since the NAS hard drives' speed would become the limiting factor before reaching that level, and the cost of upgrading the hardware to support it is prohibitively expensive. Adding a solid-state drive (SSD) cache to my NAS could be beneficial, particularly when using a 10 GbE connection. Synology provides 10 GbE add-on cards for a small portion of their stations.

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

#96
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've been doing just that for the last 30 years or so, and had to go dig out stuff several times. I was always glad I had the silly archives.

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

#97
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.

You will be known in the future as Samuel 🅱epys.

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

#98
Every time I cleaned up I regretted it a few weeks later so I stopped doing that. Storage is cheap. Keeping storage alive is not cheap however so just power down the drives and maybe spin them up once every 6 months or so, so the bearings don't seize if it's spinning rust.

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

#99

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 pe…

If you feel like: stick it on youtube or some other public host so that it is accessible to the rest of the world, no matter how rough, someone will love it. You already did all the hard work anyway!

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

#100
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I just have to keep it all until I retire. I’m sure I’ll get around to it then.

Pro tip: I have noticed that most retired people seem to have even less time in their schedule. So I would not count on it :-)
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