I’ve been working on a lot of other projects of late, including a bunch of computer related “stuff”–mainly going through a couple terabytes of media files on our NAS (Network Attached Storage) and sorting out what to keep or delete permanently. That project was necessitated by the ever-increasing monthly charges with our off-site backup host. Eventually I managed to thin 30TB down to just under 18TB, and I’m investigating other options that should allow that number to grow a bit and not also grow the monthly charges.
Why have an offsite backup? Because we like being organized and backed-up. Over the years we have had several NAS units and we store stuff we want to keep on them: digital rips of our CDs and DVDs (we still have the physical copies); archival “stuff” like interesting files, old movies, image catalog backups, old work projects, etc.; and random things like a moldy copy of eSheep.exe. (Typing of which, I wonder if there is a version that will run on a modern Mac….)
Anyway, I’ve spent a few hours every few days for the last few months going through all those files and thinning things down; turns out there were a lot of duplicates muddying things up, and a lot of just crap not worth keeping. Once I had things in shape, I was then able to put together some short movies using unused drone footage plus a few upcoming “documentary”-style shorts that we will post on this site soon. And I was able to delete about 10TB of old stuff I no longer wanted to keep.
And then I turned my focus to this site, as all image tags were lost thanks to a plugin error. Doesn’t sound like a big issue, but there are over 5000 media items uploaded to this site over ten years, and tagging is useful for keeping them organized and searchable for past images to add to new stories. I probably could have written a script to take data from a backup of the database and merge the tags back in place, but instead I used it as opportunity to do a massive tidying. Duplicates were removed, the entire taxonomy redone, and issues with thumbnails were rectified. It took me a full weekend but it got done.
So while not glamorous or involving the use of an excavator, things were dug through and sorted into nice little organized directories. This means I can make a few new documentaries on par in quality and style to last year’s expose of our horribad neighbors who refuse to pay to replace the shared fence their livestock trashed and then promptly tried to set fire to the entire hillside. Stay tuned…
Also, no pictures for this post–even after all that typing about retagging all the pictures on this site–but then who wants to see pics of before and after “space available” on some hard drives?