I am going to make a confession here: I am a digital hoarder. I discovered this yesterday, when I finally applied myself to an item that's been on my to-do list for years--tidy up digital files.
First, some context... I write, I teach writing, I spend lots of time online finding what I consider to be valuable content of every stripe (from composting toilets to social media in the classroom...sometimes these are much the same, I guess...from etymology to how to build a hen house). I have a shutterbug wife and thus several gig of digital pictures. I have five USB drives and a 500 gig external hard drive. I have thousands of mp3's of music and hundreds of podcasts I record for my online classes...
...and my desktop was something too much like my physical desk top, a catch all pile of clutter. It alone was the laughing stock of the computer staff where I work, for even those with decades of experience and exposure had not seen so much junk on the desktop.
In the past, when shifting from one machine to the next, from one classroom to the next, from one textbook to another...I would just bundle up files and shove them into some vaguely named folder (course files, oldlaptopstuff). Obviously, I've not done decent back ups, for they would simply take too long, be too inconvenient.
You'd think I'd know better, since at another job we had a data loss when my brother toasted a hard drive. Data recovery took days and would have cost thousands of dollars if done out of house.
To make a long story short (too late) I have so far purged over 20 gigabytes of digital diarrhea, and I'm not yet done. I have made many sensible folders and a good "tree" to mount all this new-found structure upon. I have a nifty synch feature that I am going to use, which will not only provide backup, it will also give me access to some of my classroom files "in the cloud" as they say.
Today I'm going to tackle the USB drives.
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3 comments:
I'm so proud of you! Since I know how much you detest all the organizational skills it is taking to accomplish this task, I must say that you are doing an amazing job! Keep up the good work and maybe one day, you'll have everything at your fingertips (so to speak!). :)
Wow. I'm impressed! Keep up the good work. I'll see if I can catch your organizing bug, as I seriously need to do the same sort of digital organizing!
The Mrs. and I just bought a new PC (itself with a 500G memory) and a 2-terabyte external drive--the second to hold a lot of her stuff from some worn-out laptops and to help store my mp3s and rips from my CD collection ("only" around 50 gigs of music--what's the problem, right?). Like the description of your PC, mine was a bit of a mess when the Mrs. undertook the task of reorganizing things and transferring them to the external drive. At the time it seemed like a lot of data, but the drive's indicator shows that there's barely anything in it.
Anyway. Especially in the cases of my mp3s and the Mrs's pictures, I'm really really glad we have the external drive. The PC will thank us when it gets older, I'm sure.
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