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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

#121

Post by eitland »

ilyt wrote: post #107
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!

Here's the thing:

There exist plenty relatively high quality photos from Christmas and other family gatherings.

Photos of ordinary things like cutting grass or milking cows however are really few and far between.

Which means some things will forever be hard to explain to my kids.

I keep almost everything except duplicates because I can always delete them later.

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

#122

Post by Wingy »

boosteri wrote: post #116
bombcar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year or so I make a folder in Downloads called “old” and put everything in there (including the “old” from the last time I did it). When I find something I need in Downloads/old/old/older/old I am happy.

Anyone figured out how to do that most efficiently? You can't have two "old" co-existign at the same time? I'm using the rename method but struggle each time Which one is better to rename, the old-old or the new-old?

This should work in PowerShell on Windows or on other systems with a normal shell as long as your downloads folder is called Downloads and you don’t have a folder called old next to Downloads:

mv Downloads old && mkdir Downloads && mv old Downloads

This is assuming there aren’t any special permissions/attributes on Downloads

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

#123

Post by euroderf »

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.

In less than five years from now, you will let rip an A.I. to go thru it all, and... Hey, Presto!

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

#124

Post by bombcar »

Wingy wrote: post #122
boosteri wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone figured out how to do that most efficiently? You can't have two "old" co-existign at the same time? I'm using the rename method but struggle each time Which one is better to rename, the old-old or the new-old?

This should work in PowerShell on Windows or on other systems with a normal shell as long as your downloads folder is called Downloads and you don’t have a folder called old next to Downloads: mv Downloads old && mkdir Downloads && mv old Downloads This is assuming there aren’t any special permissions/attributes on Downloads

Some of them seem to have weird things where renaming a directory keeps it still the "downloads" directory - I prefer moving the contents of downloads instead.

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

#126

Post by sokoloff »

esperent wrote: post #89
pjerem wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man that’s so true. And don’t get me on how the start menu is able to show you the bing results seconds before the installed application you were searching for. The search feature is so ridiculously unusable since years that I can’t imagine that someone in the windows team cares anymore. I somehow remember the indexed search to somehow work back in the vista days when it was brand new.

You can turn off the Bing search.

I don’t think that was the main complaint.

Why can’t my local application matches show up in an imperceptible amount of time?

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

#127

Post by sokoloff »

noobcoder wrote: post #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 t…

Everyone’s prohibitive level is different, but 10GbE connectivity has come down a lot in the last 5 years and is (IMO) reasonable for home backbone and select machine connectivity for techies now.

I went 10Gb for that and 2.5Gb to the kids’ desktops (with a 10Gb uplink) and I think the entire network setup was well under $1000 for 2 servers and 3 computers (1 10Gb, 2 2.5Gb). The switches and fiber link will be in service for 10 years in all likelihood, making it feel pretty reasonable to me.

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

#128

Post by vr46 »

ilyt wrote: post #107
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!

No, that's exactly the wrong take in a different way. A photograph may has intrinsic qualities aside from technical ones, and time will change how you or others feel about the picture.

And for the technical issues on top of that, technology has certainly allowed me to extract more from older photos. I suspect film scanning tech has topped out, but the processing on computer has improved slightly, and I'm able to eke pretty much all the useful information there is out of a negative or transparency. RAW processors too have improved a lot in ten years, I revisited a photo story from 2009 and pulled out a few previously unseen pictures and 2022 Capture One smoked the Lightroom 5 processor. The camera has been superseded by 2 or 3 generations (a Canon 5DII) but you could not tell.

Combining technological advances with a picture of something or someone that might not be around in ten years and you'll be glad to have it. Maybe start culling pictures from 20 years ago now instead? :D

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

#129

Post by ChoGGi »

ufo wrote: post #55
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.

And of course there's a XKCD for it: https://xkcd.com/1360/

Oh, remastered elastomania is on steam. Happy days

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

#130

Post by lucb1e »

ilyt wrote: post #111
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…

The cloud price includes powering the drives 24/7 while your price includes powering them for zero hours a day

I am well aware. The fraction of this is also peanuts compared to the drive purchase price.
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