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Archive your old projects

arne.me

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: Archive your old projects

#21
post #9
post #6

If not putting them online publicly how do you store / organize them? I just recently bought a NAS for 20 euros and have been thinking about setting it up but am skeptical of relying on it for anything too important. But then again don't feel I can really trust anything too important to be in google drive either. I also even have a hetzner nextcloud instance that I use for most low/medium importance stuff but I've fo…

The key is multiple copies everywhere. Storage is cheap these days, so you can keep more than one copy - and digital hoarding doesn’t take up much space at all.

The problem with multiple copies everywhere that is:

1) You can never remember which copy is the master or the most recent. And a backup is not a backup unless you test the restore regularly. But with multiple copies, we don't have the time to test the restores of all the backups.

2) If any of the syncing scripts stop working, you will not know for ages. Unless you have another layer of monitoring scripts that watch your backup scripts. But almost no one has the patience to do that.

I have at least 3 copies of my important files, in 3 different locations. But I fail on both of my points above.

Re: Archive your old projects

#22
post #19

My corollary axiom: “always be documentin’”, or, “document or it didn’t happen”. I’d say easily 3/4 of the best stuff I’ve ever done was never bounced from the DAW/NLE, turned into a non-realtime/static artifact from code, or otherwise made archival, and far fewer projects / prototypes / physical experiments got the respect of any capture of any kind. On a certain level I like the wabi-sabi nature of that. On another…

I read this like 3-4 times and I cannot parse or understand this comment. What does "DAW/NLE" mean? (DDG search says Digital Audio Workstation, and a whole bunch of links to something NLE Choppa). What does "non-realtime/static artifact from code" mean? What does "got the respect of any capture" mean? What does "wabi-sabi" mean? How does all this relate to "always documenting"?

DAW/NLE = digital audio workstation/non-linear editing (you'd have to search both terms in order to get the correct context, especially if used right next to each other).

The author is probably talking about video editing of some kind, whereby he either regrets not saving more source code or taking more screenshots of his work if I had to wager a guess. Not sure what the "non-realtime/static artifact from code" refers to when it comes to video editing -- perhaps much of it was rendered from code? 3D software, programmatic editing, etc.?

Wabi-sabi being used a bit weirdly in this context, but I think they mean the temporality of it all has innate beauty. Sometimes not capturing every single moment/line of code is OK, and there is beauty in a moment not strictly captured, to be appreciated more since you'll never see it again.

Re: Archive your old projects

#25
post #6

If not putting them online publicly how do you store / organize them? I just recently bought a NAS for 20 euros and have been thinking about setting it up but am skeptical of relying on it for anything too important. But then again don't feel I can really trust anything too important to be in google drive either. I also even have a hetzner nextcloud instance that I use for most low/medium importance stuff but I've fo…

Kind of jealous of your 20 Euro NAS. But generally the key to longevity is having data in many independent locations. Since you're already using Hetzner, backing up your NAS to a Hetzner StorageBox is easy and cheap. The StorageBoxes are occasionally down for maintenance and don't have top performance, but for backup they are fine. Then you can just use the NAS as primary storage.

Re: Archive your old projects

#27

A few months ago I went through my repos on GitHub and marked everything I built with Vue as “archived” which is nice as it prevents any new issues being opened and very clearly indicates the project is no longer maintained. I think it would have been a bad idea to simply outright delete them, though I did delete a few.

May I ask what you switched to? I used Vue everyday for 3-4 years and then went all in on React when I joined a former employer. Looking at my Vue projects gives me a sense of nostalgia.

Re: Archive your old projects

#28

Create a folder on your computer or get a sturdy box made of good cardboard with a lid. Name the folder “Process”. Write the word “Process” on the box. While working, occasionally take photos or screenshots of what you are doing showing your workspace, the computer desktop, the desk with pencils and papers and cables everywhere, the wall or piece of string with notes. Show the messy process of creating something. Typ…

> Practice writing down notes on a piece of paper in the dark > Thank yourself later, in years to come

I only found out about this many decades after it happened, but on the occasion of my grandfather's 60th birthday, way back in 1980-ish, my mother presented with him a large bound empty notebook labelled with his name, and explained that the purpose of the gift was that he was to start making notes about his life.

It sounds incredible, but he started writing.

All kinds of (what must have seemed) completely inconsequential stuff, what he remembered about the home he grew up in, the schools he went to, the friends he'd had, the whole nine yards.

He died not that many years later.

Note to everyone who's read this far: grab the chance to do this - either as the one writing, or the one who gifts the notebook! - while you have the chance.

"Tempus fugit" and all that.

Re: Archive your old projects

#29
post #15
post #6

If not putting them online publicly how do you store / organize them? I just recently bought a NAS for 20 euros and have been thinking about setting it up but am skeptical of relying on it for anything too important. But then again don't feel I can really trust anything too important to be in google drive either. I also even have a hetzner nextcloud instance that I use for most low/medium importance stuff but I've fo…

Where did you buy a NAS for 20 Euros? My old DNS-320 was ~100 euro new. And it kind of sucked.

An ancient Synology Disk Station DS112j with a 1TB hdd from fb marketplace.

I've never had a NAS before so wanted to play around with it before deciding to invest in a nicer one that can do more like handle Plex.

Re: Archive your old projects

#30
Re: Saving to Web Archive: just a minute ago I found out that one of my old projects isn't loading on Wayback Machine because they forgot to crawl the JS file. (Odd, not sure how they decide which dependencies to crawl...)

I was just beaming about the virtues of shipping web apps as a single self-contained HTML file (all CSS and JS in the file, rather than linked as external dependencies) for unrelated reasons, when I found that my other web app on the Web Archive works fine because I had followed this principle!

(So it also works in Wayback's *id_ mode, i.e. shipping the original HTML unaltered, because the functionality is independent from where the HTML is served.)

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