Stuffin' Stuff

The other day, I read a web article by a fellow who'd had a hard drive crash, and lost a significant amount of his stuff. He'd taken all of the reasonable precautions, and then some, including having a secondary storage array just to back up his primary. Unfortunately for him, the crash occurred while he was disassembling that backup in preparation for a move.

I thought, Poor Bastard, but also, a bit smugly, If he didn't have so much stuff, it'd not have been a problem. People just keep too much stuff. Cheap, available storage makes that possible -- things get squirreled away, and you forget about them. If you see them again, you think Oh, yeah, I want to keep that, but if you don't see them again, you forget. And even if you remember, you look a bit, and think Oh well, heck with it. Only occasionally does it happen that you actually did need it, and less often, that theres no alternative. I'm sure Bill Gates loses files, every so often.

But me, I thought, I don't have that problem, because I don't keep stuff. Oh, okay, I did wonder why the 50 gig drive on the laptop is about 80% full, but thats about the extent of it. The other day, though, I picked up a freeware package (more stuff!) called TreeSize, that reads the disk and gives you a listing of how much storage is in use, and by what. I was surprised to find that of the forty gig in use, ten gig is photographs. What? We don't take that many! And then I remembered: my daughter loves the movie button on the digital camera. Loves it. And sure enough, those AVI files are the bulk of the ten gig. So, I thought, time to implement The Plan. I plugged the USB connector from the desktop into the port on the laptop and set it to transfer the photographs over to the desktop, where I'll use the off-site storage package to migrate it. I figured it'd take about half an hour to migrate over.

Been runing for two hours now.

But that still doesn't really address the problem -- all I'm doing is moving it. Now those files will sit, unused, on the desktop PC, taking up space. I've occasionally wondered why there's no PC version of the mainframe's storage-backup systems, which can dump a little-used file to tape, recalling it when needed. The package is called DFHSM -- Hierarchical Storage Manager -- on IBM mainframes; I'm sure that there're other, equivalent processes for other systems -- and there's a whole theology about how you back up things, how often, how much you need to back up. As I recall, the last iteration, called Migration Level II, is 430 days -- once somethings been untouched for that long, odds are very good it won't ever be touched again; get rid of it.

We need that. I need that.