5 ms·

I also saved _everything_ever_ from the first files my kid fingers typed out on a C64 keyboard and put to tape, those tapes are still there, as .wav files in my

by dusted 3y ago

I also saved _everything_ever_ from the first files my kid fingers typed out on a C64 keyboard and put to tape, those tapes are still there, as .wav files in my archives.. Why wav? Because they contain not only my first love-letters that I never got a printer (nor courage) to print out, but also snippets of the music that my dad had taped onto there off of the radio in the 80s, stuck there, between my data recordings.. As someone with almost no working memory and fairly bad long-term memory, I'm so happy to have this sea of digital (and analog) detritus to sift through, to help me remember who I was and what I saw. Everything I ever downloaded, inside "Desktop/Desktop/desktop/backups/oldpc/desktop/downloads/desktop/" awaits layers of my life, ready to be explored anew. Everything from the silly gifs I got on MSN messenger, to .pif files pointin into the void to remind me of that game I once played so often it earned a spot on my desktop. Terabyte after terabyte of who I was and what I did, it is my most important treasure, and I enjoy strolling through it in it's pure, raw form.

Aerroon 3y ago
I accidentally wiped a few years of files like that once. Now there's a gap there and it makes me a bit sad. I definitely go back and sift through some of the old stuff from time to time. It's pretty great.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Yes, I think I accidentally threw the only drive (whoops) that had a lot of my childhood stuff away, in a binge of cleaning. I have recently realized there may be a couple legacy drives that might not have been wiped that might have it. I don't have much hope overall but I've been meaning to dig them out and check. this type of thing is one of the undersung benefits vs a sea of ad-hoc hard drives. yes, a central server/NAS (even just 2 disks) is expensive but it's also a central point you can rely on and centralize your backups. you can't let it become a pile either way, of course. but it's much much easier to work on manual dedup with everything on a single big zfs volume so you can compare directories and try to fold everything in sensibly. and snapshots let you roll this back if desired, or clone and copy files back out of history. I seem to recall there was an algorithm called "downward flooding" or similar that was designed to help identify this directory-tree similarity problem. But I can't quite locate it.
RGamma 3y ago
Lucky you. I'm still scraping together whatever my memory kept but so much is gone. It felt like it would last forever...

by dusted 3y ago

Aerroon 3y ago

I accidentally wiped a few years of files like that once. Now there's a gap there and it makes me a bit sad. I definitely go back and sift through some of the old stuff from time to time. It's pretty great.

paulmd 3y ago
Yes, I think I accidentally threw the only drive (whoops) that had a lot of my childhood stuff away, in a binge of cleaning. I have recently realized there may be a couple legacy drives that might not have been wiped that might have it. I don't have much hope overall but I've been meaning to dig them out and check. this type of thing is one of the undersung benefits vs a sea of ad-hoc hard drives. yes, a central server/NAS (even just 2 disks) is expensive but it's also a central point you can rely on and centralize your backups. you can't let it become a pile either way, of course. but it's much much easier to work on manual dedup with everything on a single big zfs volume so you can compare directories and try to fold everything in sensibly. and snapshots let you roll this back if desired, or clone and copy files back out of history. I seem to recall there was an algorithm called "downward flooding" or similar that was designed to help identify this directory-tree similarity problem. But I can't quite locate it.

RGamma 3y ago

Lucky you. I'm still scraping together whatever my memory kept but so much is gone. It felt like it would last forever...