Best practices for file archiving?
I’m not-so-slowly and very-surely running out of hard drive space on my little laptop, which is the central nervous system of all things DZ– especially now that I have a killer camera and am taking gianormous photos. WhatSize tells me the main culprits of space usage are my old mail archives (obsessively retained since early 2005, when I first went Mac) and of course, my pictures.
So, I’m wondering: what kinds of parameters are folks using for moving things to archive versus keeping on a running machine? The OCD-pack-rat in me likes having my entire world at my fingertips whether I’m home or not, but obviously this isn’t sustainable. (…she says as she’s downloading 7GB of pics from aforementioned camera.)
Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, to twitter me, or to drop a line.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think our little laptops are increasingly going in the direction of becoming our little cell phones or music players - getting smaller and smaller and getting more and more easy to connect to the Internet at any time.
I haven’t had your experiences with photos - but I have with music. My solution has been to setup server machines to hold all the data and get creative with synchronizing and accessing what I need over the network.
While hard drive space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper - I think our computers are getting smaller and smaller - so I do think we need to face the fact that we can’t have all our data on the devices in our hands - which doesn’t mean we can’t have access to all our data.
April 8th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Yeah, I’ve decided that everything is going to the external hard drives. Moving my iPhoto library alone freed up 15+GB. Dang.
I can’t do a network thing because I want to be able to take the drive with me to places without connectivity (i.e., Mom & Dad’s in upstate NY) and show off the photos and other creative work…
What I’m trying to decide now is where to draw some lines as far as timeframes to move things to archive. I moved all mail from 2005 last night and freed up another 1.5GB, which is nice. Going to see how my OCD self feels about that. ;-)
April 8th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Just remember that HD’s not only can fail but, particularly if you cart them about, can also get lost. That’s a plus for online - it’s usually on redundant RAID arrays that are pretty reliable. It might be an idea to use an online thing for temporary back-up, meanwhile keep a monster hard-drive at your folk’s place. It makes a good excuse to visit regularly for archiving sessions.