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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

#61

Post by bombcar »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #27
prawn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me and my Downloads folder. Apps that will never run again. Fonts I outgrew.

My Downloads folder is one of the few that actually is clean. In fact, it's usually empty. Everything downloaded is downloaded for a reason, and gets moved to the right spot as soon as the download is complete.

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.

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

#62

Post by kitsunesoba »

whartung wrote: post #50

I 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.

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

#63

Post by nicky0 »

bombcar wrote: post #61
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Downloads folder is one of the few that actually is clean. In fact, it's usually empty. Everything downloaded is downloaded for a reason, and gets moved to the right spot as soon as the download is complete.

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.

Every week I select all in my Downloads folder and delete.

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

#64

Post by JimmyRuska »

I 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 much space. Get rid of those raw video recordings and xvid/divx codec videos.

Re-encode all your old 7z, .zip, bz2, .tar.gz into zstd compressed files. It can also save a ton of space.

Buy manufacturer recertified HDDs, you can get like 18TB for $190 or so. Buy a few and put them in a truenas server. Hoard all the data you want, forever.

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

#65

Post by furyofantares »

In my 20s I got rid of some stuff on purpose, and got rid of some on accident. It's a real loss. I LOVE to time travel though all my old files and it's a shame I don't have the first years of programs I wrote, a bunch of emails, all poker hands, etc.

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

#66

Post by UncleEntity »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #27
prawn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me and my Downloads folder. Apps that will never run again. Fonts I outgrew.

My Downloads folder is one of the few that actually is clean. In fact, it's usually empty. Everything downloaded is downloaded for a reason, and gets moved to the right spot as soon as the download is complete.

Download folder is just fun.

Stuff I download for a reason gets “put away” which leaves random things to go look at when I have nothing better to do. I was poking around in there earlier today after I moved some stuff and found all sorts of interesting things to waste a couple hours.

Probably be a different story if I tried to be organized though. It tends to collect “things I need right now and will probably never use again” and pdfs that don’t get saved to the Documents folder.

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

#67

Post by sublinear »

Am 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?

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

#70

Post by chaxor »

leviathan wrote: post #35
Aeolun wrote: post #17

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 :/

> 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

Take a look at aifiles: https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles

Getting vicuna or alpaca for this could be the best decision for those that want to keep their data.

Could you imagine the space saving you can achieve by a system that constructs a real normalized duckdb database with zstd compression and join tables and all from your big dump of tar.xml.gz files? Automagically converting all of your media to AV1 and Opus to save space and remove any private codec reqs? Clear collation with directory choices similar to Linux style?

https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles seems like one of the best ideas for data organization - just needs some polishing and local-only models

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