How NOT to archive files

I ‘fess. I’m a packrat. I save everything. And since I’m ‘fessing things, I admit to not having a good system, well, ANY system, to archive digital files.

When I either change or upgrade my hardware I’ve copied my old home directories and saved them in their entirety as a archive folder in my new fresh clean home directory, and then move individual files up to work on them as needed. The plan was always to go back and systematically organize and consolidate the contents. Which never happened.

The folly of my packrat ways was highlighted when I made a backup of the files on my penultimate computer to an external usb harddrive in preparation to wipe and install a home server. Well, 5 hours and 25 GBs later the archived home directories from my last five computers finished the transfer.

So my external drive now contains the nested archived home directories from:
-> hardy.laptop
—> gutsy.laptop
—-> dapper.desktop
——-> redhat73.desktop
———> windows98.desktop

So I’ve learned that I have to Organize, Consolidate, and Delete: a.k.a. OCD ;)

This entry was posted by Sharon on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Sharing What Have I Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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