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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

#101

Post by vertis »

jacquesm wrote: post #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.

I almost never delete things. It's a form of memory and I've definitely found it possible to go back through photos, emails and journal entries to remember what I was doing at that point. Memory is linked so it only takes a few sparks to put you back in context.

In addtion, it's increasingly looking like LLMs will need inordinate amounts of data to get it to the next level. If we want this to be personalized this will certainly mean slurping our digital lives into a format for training (let's assume you can do this locally and maintain privacy).

I'm looking forward to using these capabilities to enhance my memory, and indeed one day merge those capabilities [h+]

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

#102

Post by jacquesm »

vertis wrote: post #101
jacquesm wrote: post #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.

I almost never delete things. It's a form of memory and I've definitely found it possible to go back through photos, emails and journal entries to remember what I was doing at that point. Memory is linked so it only takes a few sparks to put you back in context. In addtion, it's increasingly looking like LLMs will need inordinate amounts of data to get it to the next level. If we want this to be personalized this wil…

Funny, I wish for the opposite: to be able to forget more effectively.

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

#103

Post by Moru »

theodric wrote: post #85
Too wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could swap to Windows. The search there never finds anything , not even files that you know exist in the root of the directory you are searching inside.

Everything is the cure! https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

I love Everything, and it has a dark-mode in the latest beta! And finds stuff instantly, no more wait.

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

#104

Post by Moru »

nobody9999 wrote: post #53
lucb1e wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

>I did have 2 die at the same time: same make and model, nearly identical serial numbers, surprise: same crash date and crash behavior Out of curiosity, were those Seagate drives? I bought a couple of Seagate 3TB (spinning rust) SAS drives some years ago, and they both died within a couple weeks of each other after only a few months.

I also had two crash almost at the same time, both seagate with similar serials. This was about 20 years ago though, now I don't buy more than one harddrive at a time.

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

#105

Post by tomjen3 »

m463 wrote: post #80
voltagex_ wrote: post #69

Nah, 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.

Drive prices aren't coming down as quickly as they used to.

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

#106

Post by vr46 »

Bad take alert. I have just over thirty years of my own photos (scans too) and a lifetime of my parents photos to go through.

Time has the quality of making the ordinary extraordinary and the race to purge one thing to make way for another can be passed on as a task to the next generation.

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

#107

Post by ilyt »

vr46 wrote: post #106

Bad take alert. I have just over thirty years of my own photos (scans too) and a lifetime of my parents photos to go through. Time has the quality of making the ordinary extraordinary and the race to purge one thing to make way for another can be passed on as a task to the next generation.

Frankly most of the problem could be fixed by screening what you put into long term storage. If photo looks bad now it won't look any better in 10 years!

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

#108

Post by ilyt »

sandgiant wrote: post #93
kerkeslager wrote: post #59

> 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.

But it's NAS setup he already had and paid the cost for, both in money and knowledge, then time spent migrating.

Ready-made NAS (vs DIYng something via freenas or bare linux route) is also very little setup

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

#109

Post by ilyt »

prawn wrote: post #14
quickthrower2 wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

Here is an idea: have "forever" directory and "for 3 years" directory. Stuff lands in "for 3 years" directory by default and gets removed automatically.

"Forever" is only for stuff you personally think it's exceptionally well made.

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

#110

Post by vertis »

jacquesm wrote: post #102
vertis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost never delete things. It's a form of memory and I've definitely found it possible to go back through photos, emails and journal entries to remember what I was doing at that point. Memory is linked so it only takes a few sparks to put you back in context. In addtion, it's increasingly looking like LLMs will need inordinate amounts of data to get it to the next level. If we want this to be personalized this wil…

Funny, I wish for the opposite: to be able to forget more effectively.

I guess that's one way of looking at it. You still want to remember the important things though. Memories are funny in that they can be highly contextual. So a picture you took in Copenhagen, however bad/amateur the actual picture can be a hook for all the great times you had in Copenhagen.

It's one of the interesting side-effects of being a digital nomad. When you're in one place and doing the same thing every day it tends to get compressed and discarded. When you're constantly changing things and experiencing friction you don't drop into that 'automatic' mode in the same way. I feel like I'm constantly being challenged.

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