It was bound to happen one day, I couldn’t trust my backup system anymore as it was giving errors. So I’ve been busy for at least a week sorting out my digital footprint. Just like I’ve been busy sorting out boxes for months it keeps surprising me how much stuff a person collects over time. I have two external hard drives in raid that I’ve been using to make backups for years now, but the time had come to change to an upgraded version which I bought a couple of weeks ago, a NAS with two 4TB harddisks. Copying over the network seemed to come with some hickups as well but I’ve managed tonight to sort all the information (2TB of ‘stuff’) on the new NAS.

In the past I’ve made use of TimeMachine but I stopped using it a couple of years ago to manually make backups instead. TimeMachine keeps making copies of the same files over and over again and since I had a couple of crashes over the years I ended up with several copies of system folders and copies of a folder structure of things that I wanted to keep. I’ve been going through each and every folder to delete duplicates and arrange a new filing structure. Some months ago when I started to sort out those boxes I’ve thrown out each and every item that I nolonger used, either giving it to charity shops or putting it in bin bags to have it collected and destroyed.

I was surprised by the -insane- amount of ‘stuff’ that I had managed to collect over time as I wasn’t using most of it anymore or I simply nolonger needed it. Cleaning out each and every box made me feel better and better as it was lifting a weight from my shoulders. Decluttering is the most effective thing to do to me, making space around me and also in my head. But I didn’t expect the amount of digital clutter and I found out that I felt less comfortable deleting system files and backups I had made because of crashes, tho I’ve managed to delete about 180Gb of dublicates by manually comparing files. Yes a total drag but I kept in mind that I only had to do this once

I always got the impression that all my photo archives would take most of the disk space but boy was I mistaken. It was good having to go through each and every folder to see what was in there and if I really ‘needed’ it still. Most of it I got rid of anyway and the largest folders where the ones containing software and those system backups. Folders with 200.000+ files in them, old system folders, folders that nolonger had any use since I’ve bought at least four other computers after making the first backup and changed OS about three or four times as well. I guess the largest is my music collection but since I’ve started buying from iTunes this issue has become more organised.

Sorting my digital history was a total pain but I’m happy that I’ve managed to finish it within a time span of two weeks on and off. It was something that had been dragging my heels for years. I was extremely reluctant to act on it because of the time-consuming copying and checking, but as the other backup system slowly became unreliable I was forced to do this after all those years and I feel relieved now the job is mostly done. I still have some really old IDE disks to check but these are so old, I don’t expect to find anything spectacular on these that is worth saving. Still… I need to see what’s on them before I will use brute force and destroy all the sensitive data

The challenge now, is to keep things organised and tidy… but when I think back of all the aggravation caused by having to go through many folders containing 200.000+ files I’m pretty sure I can keep an eye on that to make sure!