Hawaii Boy

Phase one of My big stay at home project is winding down.

I have accumulated dozens of external drives over the past 20 years. From 2MB thumb drives to partitioned 4TB behemoths.

They had files that I was moving between computers, work files I wanted to keep in my bag, music from that time in 2005 that I ripped from my collection of 100s of CDs. Photos, lots of photos from computers and ripped from photo CDs from the photo center, back ups of old phones and IOS.

Computer backs ups, I had dozens of those. I even found a back up from my last personal Windows machine in 2003. Then there were the downloads from failed cloud services (Copy.com. Bitcasa, EverPix, etc etc). Hundreds of pages and photos that were scanned through the years. All of that content from my old web clients, folders upon folders.

The strategy was to move all of the data to a couple of 4TB drives, which took a long time. I used my Mac Mini server to handle moving. It has ample ports and is on all the time.

Then came scrubbing the data. I have 4 tools to help -Chronosync -Automator Folder Zapper action that collapses a folder structure. -A little app called “Find Empty Folders”. MacOS loves to create folders. -Gemini Duplicate finder

The first thing I did was to move all of the music and photos to separate drives using Finder and Chronosync Then collapsed the folder structure, ran Empty folder finder and finally Gemini to find duplicates.

I’d love to automate that, but that’s above my pay grade.

I found many GB of duplicates, as many of the back ups through the years had much of the same data.

Once I had the data down to a manageable and definable level, I moved it to it’s final homes. Ran Gemini again on each drive just make sure.

The photos (632Gb) are on their own drive with a back up that runs weekly. They are also backing up to Google photo and Apple Photos. I’ll spend time scanning and cleaning up those in the coming weeks

The music (216GB) was copied to the Mac Mini drive (Time Machine backed up) so the Music app and Music match can work their magic. It was nice seeing some of my long lost music on my phone. A copy of the music was also kept behind as back up.

Finally there’s the rest of the data (2.5TB). There’s still a lot of file level work to do. I’m sure many files will go away. Once this data is whittled down, I’ll copy it to iCloud Evernote or Google Drive.

All 3 of these drives are backing up to AWS Glacier with Polar app.

Whew, That was harder than cleaning up the analog stuff around the house.

Phase one of My big stay at home project is winding down. I have accumulated dozens of external drives over the past 20 years. From 2MB thumb drives to partitioned 4TB behemoths. They had files that I was moving between computers, work files I wanted to keep in my bag, music from that time in 2005 that I ripped from my collection of 100s of CDs. Photos, lots of photos from computers and ripped from photo CDs from the photo center, back ups of old phones and IOS. Computer backs ups, I had dozens of those. I even found a back up from my last personal Windows machine in 2003. Then there were the downloads from failed cloud services (Copy.com. Bitcasa, EverPix, etc etc). Hundreds of pages and photos that were scanned through the years. All of that content from my old web clients, folders upon folders. The strategy was to move all of the data to a couple of 4TB drives, which took a long time. I used my Mac Mini server to handle moving. It has ample ports and is on all the time. Then came scrubbing the data. I have 4 tools to help -Chronosync -Automator Folder Zapper action that collapses a folder structure. -A little app called “Find Empty Folders”. MacOS loves to create folders. -Gemini Duplicate finder The first thing I did was to move all of the music and photos to separate drives using Finder and Chronosync Then collapsed the folder structure, ran Empty folder finder and finally Gemini to find duplicates. _I’d love to automate that, but that's above my pay grade._ I found many GB of duplicates, as many of the back ups through the years had much of the same data. Once I had the data down to a manageable and definable level, I moved it to it's final homes. Ran Gemini again on each drive just make sure. The photos (632Gb) are on their own drive with a back up that runs weekly. They are also backing up to Google photo and Apple Photos. I'll spend time scanning and cleaning up those in the coming weeks The music (216GB) was copied to the Mac Mini drive (Time Machine backed up) so the Music app and Music match can work their magic. It was nice seeing some of my long lost music on my phone. A copy of the music was also kept behind as back up. Finally there's the rest of the data (2.5TB). There's still a lot of file level work to do. I'm sure many files will go away. Once this data is whittled down, I’ll copy it to iCloud Evernote or Google Drive. All 3 of these drives are backing up to AWS Glacier with Polar app. Whew, That was harder than cleaning up the analog stuff around the house.