lots of files

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin
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That's been true since disk drives were 20MB. Unless there is some security concern, there is no point deleting files. $/MB gets smaller much faster than I can fill the drives. The drives might just as well be write once. ;-)

Probably. They're dirt cheap now. I have a 512MB SSD on my laptop but also a couple of 500MB and a 3TB USB drive for backup and large files. My entire CD library (ripped to MP3s) is on the laptop's 512MB drive, too (no reason for it to be, really). Even that is trivial space.

Reply to
krw

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to delete a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making $50 an hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to delete 16.7 GB.

On the WABAC machine, people listened to the radio, on headphones, with one diode junction. For a long time, a lot of people listened to the radio on sets that had five "transistors" in them - each one dissipated a few watts. Compare that to how many transistors are in a new digitally-tuned AM/FM radio, that costs less, sounds better, and takes a couple of watts.

640 KB ought to be enough for anybody!

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds

You obviously don't write code!

For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine: 548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows: 303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB) 134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB) Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can cut that dramatically).

The problem with bigger drives (esp under Windows) is when something goes wrong, it takes *forever* to scan/repair!

Reply to
Don Y

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single source file per program!

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough already.

I have hot-plug RAID drives, and rotate them, so if things really get trashed I can just plug in a drive that was dropped off a while ago. Projects and mail are backed up to a network drive, a USB hard drive, and Dropbox, so I can get back up pretty fast.

With the size of SD cards ever increasing, maybe we'll never delete any pic from a still camera.

Some day we'll all walk around with a video cam recording every minute of our lives. No more debates about who said what when.

I guess the hard drive is a serious civilization changer.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

It's not just the sources (though the NetBSD repo, below, *is* just "sources" -- but, then again, that would be like having the sources for all of *Windows* on your machine!) but, also, the tools to create them (and the other materials that you may need *in* their creation).

E.g., EMACS (a "text editor") clocks in at ~4,000 files. SfU (tools that let Windows talk to and behave like my UN*X boxen) is ~12,000 files. Etc.

Interesting that you would think music *complicates* life!

You still have to rebuild the old drive. If it's a TB or more, this takes a fair bit of time. And, move to a new machine and you're starting from scratch (reinstalling all of your apps, etc.)

Ha! I put a 512M card in my other half's camera when she got it. A few days later, complained it was full. OK, teach her to pull the pictures off and store them on another drive. Replace 512M with 2G (or was it 4G?) figuring it gives her a bit longer before she has to repeat the exercise.

That was before I taught her how to use the "rapid shot" mode of the camera to catch birds in flight (instead of trying to wait for the right shot, etc.). So, now, instead of *one* (bad) photo of a bird, she'll have half a dozen -- each slightly spaced from the others in time...

I suspect she now spends a day every two weeks moving photos off the card, studying them, then filing them in suitable "folders". She long ago gave up the idea of tagging each individual photo with search terms (to make it easier to locate photos having specific content) and now just plops them all in general folders (subject matter for her paintings).

I'm sure she'll soon be complaining that the 500G drive she is currently using is "full" and looking for me to extend it ("Delete some photos? Why? How would I decide *which* ones to delete?")

That's why we have email. Makes it much easier to archive discussions. (I guess you could do similarly with audio -- but that seems a bit creepy)

Like most technologies, a double-edged sword. I sure like having my music on a small disk instead of stacks of vinyl and CD's. And, nice to replace my paperback library with ebook versions (that weigh a helluvalot less than all that PAPER).

OTOH, if forced to stick with old audio, book, etc. formats, I'd probably discard a lot more stuff!

Reply to
Don Y

I just BD ripped and HD DVD ripped and transcoded 4TB this week. Almost my entire collection. Then, I transcoded them down in res and file size to play on any device, and yet still be as sharp as a tack.

2TB became a couple hundred GB for 175 flics. And I am still going and haven't looked at my old DVD collection yet for gems from that stock.

Favorite watched film this week, and maybe for a long time very high in my list...

42

I also watched "The Time Machine" this week, and was saddened to hear about Rod Taylor's passing.

I liked "The Time Machine" far better than "The Birds", which everyone seems to be acclaiming him for.

I think that Robin William's part in "Night At The Museum" had some oddly prophetic lines in it for him. Or maybe he knew... way back then.

Anyway, I keep a drive for windows, and my other drives are separate.

Linux is far better about NOT bloating out your system drive. Microsoft are just willy nilly idiots.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

"Unless I start collecting movies or something..."

Good flick but it's not one I have any interest in watching again.

Liked the book. Movie, not so much. It was on the TeeVee during the day a couple of weeks ago.

Another good flick, one I have watched more than once.

...as opposed to OS snobs

Reply to
krw

On a sunny day (Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Some time ago I realized that all the software I have ever written, plus all the emails and postings, fit on one USB flash disk.

Harddisks, FLASH memory, optical disks, in a hundred years or less you will be forgotten. I have some on M-DISC, and OK, 2 hundred years, if the technology to read those is still around. Archaeologists will have fun with those thousands of years from now, maybe they can get data back with better methods.

Technology moves on, for some old stuff you need to keep the tools with the projects. Burn those to M-DISC, and just wipe the harddisks clean.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

yup... deleting is almost a lost game. If you've not done it, worth running a dupe finder once to catch the few biggest dupes.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

Rather than 'cull', I 'collect'

Transfer the whole huge mess somewhere as an achive, then go back and get the ones that I want.

Use the same principle for office/lab 'cleanup'...take everything OUT of the room(s), then bring back only as needed. Beauty is that the process is pretty much automatic.

Reply to
RobertMacy

I get a new, bigger drive, mirror my main drive, and then expand it, then, I mirror some other volumes and expand those. When I am done, I have a new drive and a perfect backup snapshot. Sometimes I dump the old drive and its volumes and make it a data drive, sometimes not.

So, I have twenty drives in the room, some old IDE, mostly SATA. My machine has 6TB on it, and my i7 has an SATA hot swap bay which I place

2TB seagates into all the time, hot.

Currently I am toying with mSATA drives in USB3 enclosures as an OS stick that boots up Linux on anything it gets put into.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

There are people now with 40-80T in their houses for movies etc. Wait until 4K and 8K resolutions become popular.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Spehro Pefhany

My packrat XP computer has 1,404,271 files on it, in about 700G.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Spehro Pefhany

We're doing a waveform generator box that uses a 128G class 10 SD card to store waveforms. Long ago (like, 6 months) that was expensive.

We can read files at 10 to 12 Mbytes/sec, with a microZed/ZYNC board, which is good enough for now.

Why did you do THAT?

Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

Cameras should have folders, too.

The hard drive makes the Web useful. Enormous buildings are constructed near power stations and dams, full of spinning disks. Some small percentage of the power generated in the US powers hard drives.

All those unused, unsorted old files on mine are still spinning around at thousands of RPMs, on multiple hard drives.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

Time for a disk cleanup!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

When you're trying to photograph, e.g., a Harris's Hawk doing something

*other* than perching on a branch or soaring in free flight (like, for example, launching itself *off* it's perch so there is some dynamism in the photo), you can't "go tight" (focus on *just* the hawk -- you just can't hold a camera that steady nor expect the tree to remain so!) and *hope* to snap the shutter at the instant it takes flight.

Instead, spend some time trying to catch it in a larger frame and lean on the shutter release as soon as it "twitches". Later, look through the shots to see which (if any) caught the action you sought.

Doesn't work. When you later try to enlarge and crop the photo to isolate *just* the hawk (in the above example), you end up losing all the detail. She's not interested in "lots of sky" with a speck of a bird in it, etc.

Likewise, she'll take a photograph of running water and enlarge and crop some *tiny* section-of-interest to show a particularly interesting pattern of water swirling around a branch or some other obstruction in it's path...

Complicates the UI/UX. People like her just want to "click click" and not think twice about which photos belong together -- or not. That's what the time at home in front of the PC is all about.

In her case, I think the best gain would be to let me put a larger monitor on that machine so she can see more, BIGGER thumbnails in each screenful. But, she has very definite opinions about what she wants on *her* desk...

Reply to
Don Y

I think you'll find it doesn't pay for the time it takes to run!

Even if you find a true duplicate, you have to then sit down and ask yourself "does this second (third?) copy need to be *here* for some reason? Would I break anything if I moved it??"

Similarly, do I *need* to keep the last version of this program around? Am I *ever* likely to need it? Why not just stick with -CURRENT and forget all that came before??

Then, consider: OK, if I get rid of it, I recover a bit of space on a medium that is essentially *free*. And, at the same time, run the risk that if I *need* it at a later date and can't *get* another copy of it...

Reply to
Don Y

I don't keep "everything" (or even "much of ANYTHING"!) on a single computer -- nor a single spindle. Instead, I scatter things around based on how they are likely to be needed (referenced).

E.g., my lossless music archive is in one place; lossy (mp3) in another. Research/academic OS's here; commercial/FOSS OS's there. Novels one one drive; research papers on another. Etc.

Then, duplicate (not sector-by-sector) each onto a second spindle.

This lets me keep only the copies that I need "spinning" at any given time -- and, only long enough to retrieve stuff (or add stuff).

Notable exception is a pair of "shelf's" that I use -- plus the two "repository machines" (WABAC1 and WABAC2).

In the past, I did this with a hodgepodge of COTS NAS boxen, odds-n-ends pressed into service as file servers, etc.

I am now favoring small-ish (

Reply to
Don Y

Same size monitor with more pixels then?

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Jasen Betts

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