I don’t hide the fact I’m a bit of a packrat, especially when it comes to data archived on computer systems both local to me and remote. Earlier in November I wrote about finally cleaning up my email inboxes of mail that, in some cases, has been archived for over 15 years.
That’s, in some ways, just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got local files stored going back easily as far which I have done some cleanup of in the past but never done a full “audit” of to judge if I will ever need them again, which likely isn’t the case I can already say with some certainty.
The other thing is since I got the machine I currently use in 2014 it’s basically collected all kinds of data from the past 6 years, much of that long past its useful life as much as any other archived files I have sitting around on magnetic disks.
The thing is, going through all that data and actually cleaning it up is a tedious pain in the ass. We all know this and I fully admit I’m quite lazzy when it comes to such, which is why I’ve let the data build up over the past half decade.
Well, it hit me that I have 2 separate external 2TB hard drives just sitting unused and they would actually be a perfect place for me to offload the bulk of this data and go through it — see what’s critical to keep, like regularly used project files, and toss out what’s left, like old screen captures for ancient posts and the like.
Cleaning up duplicate data would also be a plus, and it might just be a chance for me to see what I really have to work with in the “Xadara Archives” as I call some of these folders.
Additionally just offloading these files from my main system to a long term storage will help with keeping that computer alive for a bit longer till I finally replace it — less stress on the hard drive and what have you, and more space to work on new projects.
It takes a while to clean up what feels like a lifetime of files, but I started with good progress on my email (and have kept that clean in the month following that last article) so, hopefully this project, once started, will turn out just as good.
Quite honestly, it’s been too long coming that I’ve needed to finally throw away some of my digital past. I’m moving forward, as we all should as time passes.
Well, that got a little deep, didn’t it? Ah well, such is life.
