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 with storage still growing decently, why should i delete anything? It's not like physical boxes of photos/etc that would take up more and more space every year.
Indeed the emotional value of said sometimes silly things can't be understated
Not strictly useful I guess, I think there's value in being able to engage in one's old projects more deeply than screenshots can allow. It can be a bit of a trip to look at code I wrote 5-10+ years ago.
The same plan with regards to tagging my thousands of photos worked out great! Without me needing to anything else, auto-tagging has gotten good enough that I can find images that had been lost under some IMG_xxxx.JPG filename for years. I'm looking forward to being able to explore my history onion of folders at my leisure soon enough. :)
13 years and counting. But I’m sure I’ll eventually clean mine up
But then again - I have the same problem as OP. I have terabytes of photos which I should really cull but I can't get myself to do it because I'm a lazy fuck.
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 that hole, are just filled with detritus and garbage.
My Spotlight is gorged with false positives for some terms. And I know that I have searched for things that I know I have, but unable to locate, or at least certainly not easily, because I was searching “wrong”.
Indexing provides lightning fast access to everything I don’t want to see.
Mind not much I plan to do about it. I guess I can take some “never again“ stuff, put them on an external drive, and tell Spotlight to ignore it.
That said also, my phone is full. About 2g free. Mostly photos and videos. Mostly my cats. Solution is simple. Need a bigger phone.
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.
On my new laptop, which I bought a year ago, still running Windows 10, it has always worked perfectly. Not sure if MS fixed something, or some kind of indexing error happened on my old laptop.
I’ve also built a small tool to check whether some git repo is in sync with upstream, so it could be deleted: https://gitlab.com/leipert-projects/git-recon
https://github.com/arqbackup/arq_restore
I've been using Arq for years, but I need to look into the "Glacier Deep Archive" format which is about 1/20th the cost of the fastest storage class.
Of course, that's not entirely apples to apples because they save you labor time, but I find it an interesting baseline comparison, also because their labor is divided over a hundred thousand customers and approximates to zero per customer.
Another thing people tend to forget is that it's a backup copy, not your only. You don't need the premium storage if you keep the original copy around anyway and the odds of 3 unrelated drives (1 at home, 2 off-site) dying at the same time are probably better than you getting into a car crash this year. I did have 2 die at the same time: same make and model, nearly identical serial numbers, surprise: same crash date and crash behavior (few KB/s sequential read speeds for a while, but strangely no data was corrupted, before entirely crashing).
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.
Normal USB 3.0 port can do 4.5W. So sticking that contraption into such port will not work reliably at all. Specially marked USB 3.0 port can deliver maybe 7.5W. Type-C ports, who knows. Depends on what the port advertises via pullup-resistors. It may be 4.5W, 7.5W or 15W. You never know.
Nice in theory, but none of the usb nvme adapters that I bought work reliably in any port for longterm use.
They certainly don't work in any low power devices, like various ARM SBC USB ports because most of those use current limiting power switches for USB ports.
And they don't work in my workstation reliably longterm either, for whatever reason.
I guess you really have to be lucky to have a 15W Type-C data port. Funny how often these sell with Type-C <-> USB-A cables, though.
It's possible to configure NVMe devices with power caps, but the 970 Evo in the article loses 95% of its performance if you cap it to 3.6W, which is its lowest operational power state.
1: Edited to say this is because mine is a 970 Evo Plus apparently the original really did draw that much current.
Heh, yeah I saw about 4 MiB/s max read speed with similar enclosure plugged into USB 3.0 port (I guess it self limited for a while). Meanwhile much less power hungry SATA SSD + USB-SATA bridge worked at 400 MiB/s there.
Absolutely some drives won't qualify, especially PCIe 5. But many will be fine. Also, PCIe 3 x4 is 4GBps or 32Gbps which isn't that far from saturating usb4 anyways, so it's not like we even can get drives running full tilt over USB at present. Many of these controllers probably top out at PCIe 3 or even less, if they don't support 40Gbps (most cheap-ish ones won't).
Hopefully we start seeing some usb-pd capable systems & drives. The want to plug in 2 or 4 drive 3.5" enterprise drive arrays to my laptop & have it just work. Even just a single 3.5" of power would be so helpful. And it'd mean you could alternatively be charging your phone well too, which is probably the more common everyday ask.
Also I have one of those Power-Z Type-C <-> Type-C power meters, and even with less power hungry western digital nvme, it didn't fit into 4.5W. And it consumed the most power not even during initial write test, but during a minute after kernel reported sync() success so after everything was supposedly written to the device and no power hungry activity was needed. Then it jumped to 7-8W.
I guess these dram-less nvme's do some reshuffling from faster flash to slower flash locations during idle time. Which is probably terrible for portable use, where you may want to sync() and then unplug the device once the OS tells you everything is synced up. Creating regular power loss situations during these reshufflings just feels like putting too much trust into nvme firmware, IMO. :D
Aren't there some with their own external power? If anyone has a brand/model to recommend I'm all ears.
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 all this time doing all this migrating and reorganizing activity that seems an awful lot like work.
People in this trap will talk about how minimalism and decluttering are about making their lives easier and simpler, but that's not what I'm seeing happening. This seems harder and more complicated. I don't want to have to be an "advanced user".
I fell for this for a while myself, but no longer. I want to be a dumb user. There are other things I want, like security and privacy, and control of my own data, and to his credit the author does mention that, but if that's your goal be focused on that, not this not-quite-sensible form of decluttering I keep seeing popping up.
Ready-made NAS (vs DIYng something via freenas or bare linux route) is also very little setup
Then backs it up to the cloud?
On any given day, I will have 5-7 external drives connected, plus a NAS box. There are another 15+ drives (2-5TB) in the drawer beside me. SSDs as drives I actively work from and platter drives for backups or rendered footage.
I feel like the secret is to nailing the workflow at ingest/render because it’s painful trying to going through en masse and a year later.
Edit: I’ll add that I think one problem is that in shooting with a drone, there’s less to cull. Everything is in focus. A high percentage of the photos are usable in media libraries for the client and about 95% of all video shot is. My wife is a photographer and far fewer shots make the cut because of focus, or a facial expression, etc.
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 way more easier in terms of disks and time taken to back it up etc.
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.
The 2-4 connected SSDs are usually projects I'm actively working intensely on that day or week, or they're annual Lightroom drives where I still need to access 2021-23 pretty regularly.
The 2-3 platter drives have slightly older projects, or edited/rendered files that I need to regularly send/shuffle/folio/etc but that don't need to be quite as fast. Or they're drives I'm assembling to post out.
now running an always-online raid server? nah.
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.
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
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.
They were stupid easy to trade over IRC on dial-up because they were so small.
I use TrueNAS and the cache works only for reads, it helps with navigation of the folder structure (tens of thousands of photos, for example), but not with writes and not with most reads. Some other solutions can do write caching on SSD, that may improve the performance over 10 Gbps network a lot, but for 1 Gbps cache is not that useful.
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.
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+]
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.
If your file system is slightly out of sync, try out meld for an easy way to diff.
250 min hd was a lot once
Then the 1 GB hds.
Storage will go in lockstep with video quality online and on device.
What’s a reasonable amount of storage for 8k video?
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?
Umm doesn't gigabit ethernet basically give you a max of 125MB/s anyways? And I was seeing transfer rates of sequential read from 7200rpm SATA drives greater than that even 8 years ago...
10GbE NAS are starting to become more available in the prosumer range. Once they are more affordable I wonder if they are reasonably close to saturating the SATAIII limit.
I still have data going back to around 95 though, and I like that. Pictures and chat logs from way back when I first met my wife. Old games I played as a teen. Some of the code I wrote way back when I was first learning and some of my first open source contributions.
I did lose a lot along the way, though. Sometimes I wish I could still see some of that earliest stuff. And things that have been lost on the ephemeral 'net - old BBS discussions, usenet topics, my teenage livejournal, etc. that I didn't copy and save.
The tough part is that it gets hard to manage.
While I do pull forward the most important stuff each time I get a new PC, a lot of the rest is sitting in old backup formats from various backup software that I might not even be able to restore anymore. It's always nice when I think of something I used to have and can go dig it out of one of those backups, but I don't know that I will always be able to.
And it can be really hard to find something. I've tried various organizational schemes over the years, but that just means that some things are organized one way and some are organized another, and it's even more difficult to find things. I suppose I should go through and re-organize everything into one consistent standard structure, but that's what I've always done before and it just becomes like the XKCD about adding yet another standard.
Anyway, the digital clutter still works well enough for me. It's sort of a cozy old home filled with sentimental things instead of a sterile empty monastic cell.
It’s not easy to know what to delete on the present day but some years later it is. I never regreted having deleted anything!
What about deleting the worse photos from that hike 10 years ago? If you don’t like them now, most likely you never will… and nobody wants to rewatch hundreds of photos from that hike. Not even you.
It's the same approach I take with tax documents. Roughly group by year, yes, but why carefully select which ones I have to keep now, when I can just throw all of them out in a few more years?
The best way I've found is to make photo books. Most companies use print technology that lasts upwards of 200 years https://your-digital-life.com/long-will-photo-books-last/. Print a few books, give them to a few relatives, and you can be assured that the best of your photos will be viewed for decades to come. This way you can share your best while still hoarding that archive of every. last. photo.
And as personal (local) search gets better with smarter systems it may be that future codebases will surface interesting insights or memories of some long ago event or activity as it can do with photos today.
However when my parents pass on I will discard all the landscape photos and and all the photos of long dead relatives I only met as a kid and don't even remember. Some of those are quite meaningful to my mum and dad, but are meaningless to me.
But hoarding gigabytes is pretty easy, also I think the term hoarding is pretty loaded language in this context? Saving things so they don't get lost is the way to go.
Just as an example, after Steve Jobs died apple went into everyone's email at .me and deleted their emails between them and SJ.
You probably didnt see that coming.
That’s not my experience, having recently built a PC for myself. SN850x 4TB was about 2x the 2 TB price. (Depending on the day, it was -15% to +20% from the linear price, but was usually in the 3-5% higher than linear.)
I didn’t see a reason to go small for a couple hundred bucks of delayed purchase.
Edit: this is for London pricing, guess it's a bit higher.
Embrace the sublime minimalism of leasing your data from someone else's computer.
