You know. Russian Nesting Dolls.
That’s what we’ve got for a file system. First you crash a computer. But save its files. Do it three times. Then get a new computer and move the files. But restore the files you’re working on. Do this through Dos 3.5, 5, Windows, Windows, Windows—not even mentioning IASC art programs and Photoshop, Eudora, Microsoft Office, OZwin, Golden Retriever, Compuserve, XYWrite, Wordperfect, .txt, .doc, .let, .tmp, .mem, .log, etc, etc, etc, from 1980 to 2009. Nest all of that. Then, starting with the 1980’s, realize your 5 1/4 disks are outmoded, so load all your backups onto the machine that can still read those, including the floppies from the luggable’s drive, then convert to 3.5 stiffies, and have a system crash. Back up again. Save everything. Get it on disks. Oops. Tape backups, IOmega backups; get all those onto disk: they’re going to change the media again. Laptops. Another version of windows. Internet downloads. Webpages, in all their versions. Frontpage. NAMO, htm, html. System crash, re-backup. Now everything is going to cd-rom. Reload everything. Back up again. Motherboard dies. New system. Bring up old data. Finish getting it onto cd-roms. Oops. Now we’re DVD. Get everything backed up off 3 laptops and the desktop which is the central repository of old files.
Then you stare at a stack of dvd’s that could populate a store, and realize—it’s a mess. It’s a real mess. Everything is backed up, but there are no labels that make any sense: a cd or dvd just can’t list everything that’s on it and you’d have to boot each to find out what’s there.
Sigh. And do it for two and three writers under the same roof, interchanging files and using, at times, the same machines, then linking by house network.
This is where we threw up our hands and got the terabyte drive. I’ve put the thing in my Amazon store: costs 128.00, and is thus far immaculate. We have shoved everything since 1980 onto that drive, and we find directories that look like this:
Directory A: directories B-N, another copy of directory A INCLUDING B-N, and loose files that belong to directories O-Q, and one to B, plus some unidentified .exe files. Inside the second director A is, of course, another Directory A, and all those files and directories. Repeat this for 20 levels.
Ever been in a hall of mirrors? And some of the files differ from the ones in the later (enveloping) directories by a handful of bytes. Others differ by hundreds.
I am going down that list. I shudder when, embedded in Directory A 10, I find a file labeled: CJC Backup files, which contain, yes, MORE Directory A’s. Or “Misc Directory”—an adventure involving stray single files and a couple of unique subdirectories.
My technique. Every directory I’m working with gets renamed 1AAname. This throws it to the top of the heap. Once resolved, its pieces are renamed Zname, which drops them to the bottom. If a directory contains extraneous files or pieces whose parent directories are z’ed and out of reach, I whisk those into a directory named 1AAMisplaced, which I later empty. You ‘steer’ this mess by renaming either 1AA or BB or zz or the like. And once you get a collection of files with similar names all together in the list, you run Duplicate File finder on that set, and it will dump the chaff, and id the ones that do need changed names to coexist in the same file. So finally you have one pure Directory A that has only Directory A files, and Directory B is beginning to shape up, etc, etc, with its own unique files. I’m taking the little matroushka dolls out of the larger dolls and am creating order in the universe. This is actually going faster than you’d imagine.
Let me give you some tips from my bad example. 1. If it is likely you will want to preserve unique versions of your files, use the date as part of the file name. A lot of these were done while we were only alloted 8 letters for a file name. Take advantage of the additional letters, and call things by unique names. Twenty-two files of varying length all named EXPLOR1.wpd are not helpful—particularly if the computer helpfully suggests it can overwrite anything of the same file name to solve your problem. You would not want that to happen. No, nay, no way. (2. do not leave loose unrelated files in directories that have other directories in them. (3. Do not endlessly back up nested directories: they only get worse and deeper with every pass. Unravel the nests before backing up, and label so you have a clue what’s actually backed up. A directory full of novels that is already 3 directories deep should not be labeled “Archive” and blindly backed up with every new drive you buy. IE, do not make your working hard drive the ultimate repository of massive files. Just back the sucker up and shelve it. My life would be so much simpler if I’d done that.
Of course, as fast as they were changing media formats I had a paranoid fear of seeing my work turn out unreadable, the way my old Atari floppies did. Though I got almost all of them (late 70’s). The cellwriter and typewriter, alas, cannot be resurrected except by scanning.
I love this Duplicate File Program.
AAAaaaagh!!
I wish you the very best of luck cleaning your digital garage. I also want you to know that I will be very, very grateful when you get some of your work up on Closed Circle.
I like to use a tool called WinMerge for this kind of thing. You can compare two files, two directories, or even multiple subdirectories. It will try to compare any ANSI text files as well and give you a chance to merge the differences. I just checked, and the download is at winmerge.org
That said, I still have a directory Sandor with a bunch of subdirectories, one of which is oldSandor with many of the same subdirectories and then two or three different zipped versions of even older versions of /Sandor… Physician heal thyself indeed ! 🙂
– S
Runs screaming….I hope my computer life is never so complex, and am sorry yours is!
oh dear Lord, what a mess. And I am so blissfully happy that I am largely computer illiterate and never really had anything worth backing up until we got a fairly nice digital camera [although all the early pics, including the 2002 Olympics went phzzt several years ago and is why only husband played with digital and I insisted on film until a couple of years ago]. Never really did much on the home system. Work is another matter and I try to keep that clean, but I really could dump a fair amount of what’s squirreled away in there. And I am so blissfully happy that some annonymous they do system backups that don’t involve me.
But oh, I shudder to think of what you had to do with all the manuscripts and bits and pieces over the years, and I can sure see it happening! So many folk forget how fast the media was evolving with major changes seemingly happening every 6 months and most everything sudden obsolete. Sounds like some single malt is called for — maybe a lot of single malt!
I do the archiving at an ad agency and we use a program called “WhereIsIt” to keep track of all of our files. What we do is burn DVDs and name them something organized like “Archive_1” “Archive_2” etc (we are in the 500s now) and after we burn each DVD we save an “image” of its contents into a Where Is It “catalog”. WhereIsIt never stores the actual files but it allows you to search your entire collection for a single file name and it will tell you which DVD/CD/Storage Device it is stored on. I can search my entire collection, see folder structures, file extensions, dates, sizes…all from my chair. I don’t have to dig through the piles popping in DVD after DVD. I can know exactly which one it is on and go right to it.
So say I want to find files we did for a certain client in 2004. I just type in the client name in the search box and it will tell me it has found that name on a certain number of DVDs. If I know I want a specific poster I’d search for the client name and “poster” and it will tell me “Archive_305”. We keep all of the DVDs in binders and I just have to flip through and there it is. You can use other media besides DVD, but it seems to work well enough for us.
The trick to this system is that you name each file something logical to you. Or even the folder structure as it preserves that too. So a folder would be called “Sprint” and inside of that would be folders called “Posters” “Ads” “Copy” “purchased images” and inside one of those would be the actual file like “24x51_Poster-final.pdf”
http://www.whereisit-soft.com/
“Every item in catalog includes detailed basic information about files and folders you would come to expect, like name, size, date, file attributes and similar, but WhereIsIt adds to that its own information it provides as a catalog program. For example, every item can include up to 32 KB textual description, a small thumbnail image, you can assign items custom-defined, multi-level categories or flags, you can even assign them so-called alias names, under which are they known in catalog – for example, if the real file name is to cryptic. When displayed in WhereIsIt, items can be colored according their type, assigned categories or flags… All of those can be used to find items you are looking for, or just make browsing your disk images a lot simpler and more fun.”
I’m sorting out computer bits and bobs to send to e-cycling, and found my old laptop. It’s more than 10 years old, but still works — sort of. This is the era when an extreme upgrade was the 64M of RAM I spent an extra $120 for, it still has a 3 1/2″ floppy drive, and can’t accommodate a cable modem. The CD reader is stuffed, as is the lone USB port, and pulling out the hard drive would necessitate ripping off the whole case. I inventoried the contents, and there is very little in there I would want to keep, and nothing personal; I think I will just sent it away with a bon voyage.
I have some old PCs that I would like to get rid of, but have held onto because I have no idea how to get rid of all the personal information on them. Sure, it’s nothing that will probably fall into evil hands, but I’d still like to wipe the drive before I send it off. Anybody have any helpful tips? Especially if the computer is stand alone, so I can’t use a different computer to command it to do anything.
There is only One Way To Be Sure that a drive is irrecoverable: physical destruction. Easiest is about three good whacks with a sledgehammer (which is what a farmer calls a doublejack) on the hard drive, which is simple to remove. Place the drive on a solid surface and whale away at it.
Second best is fire.
#
That said, there are very satisfactory file-shredding programs available for free (a good one is on Spybot Search and Destroy, a nifty program no one with a computer should be without anyway. Spybot has a DOD-grade file shredder which overwrites a file 6 or 7 times with random bits. But it’s not as FUN to use! 😀
Back in the day, I was in an Army Signal Company that had thermite sheets for quick, sure destruction of documents and hardware. Thermite is even better than a hammer, but for personal use it has several drawbacks. 1. It’s illegal in most areas. 2. It’s harder to light than you might think from TV shows. 3. Once it is lit, it’s a major fire problem — the Fire Marshall will be seriously PO’ed, see 1 above. 4. A hammer is “good enough” unless it’s important that the remains not be recognizable as a former disk drive.
One of our guys at the shop has decided to disassemble every broken hard drive we get. Not just to make the data unreadable (cracking open the case and bending or breaking the actual disk in several places is a good start), but because he’s a nerd and wants all those nifty rare earth magnets for his geek projects. If you need refrigerator magnets, hard drives are a good source of magnets that will hold not just your grocery list, but most likely a whole notepad.
Actually, Chondrite, some of the larger drive magnets will bid fair to hold the damn fridge! They can and will damage the sheetmetal of the door.
OMG, I though it was bad enough that I have user nested inside user on my pc. anyone know how I can resolve that? (everything was downloaded off my old pc and stayed in its old user nesting …)
The analogy used in my department is that owning a digital object is a lot less like owning a book … and a lot more like owning a puppy. The book will happily sit on the shelf, and generally not deteriorate … but the digital object, like the puppy, requires constant maintenance and care. At least you’re not putting it all onto DVD, where the medium can break down in a few years.
My low-tech (if extreme) way of getting rid of data on hard disks is to destroy the disks themselves. It can be fun!
All you need, after removing the drive from the system box, is a cheap set of Torx screwdrivers, a boxcutter and a pair of pliers. Unscrew everything in sight. Some screw heads are under adhesive tape. On Seagate drives there is a metallic tape that seals the two halves of the case; this must be removed.
Open the case to expose the drive platters. Unscrew everything there too. Rip off the drive heads with the pliers. Extract the extremely powerful magnet with care and attach to your fridge. You’ll need a tool to lever the thing off. (heehee)
At this point your hard disk is dead, dead, dead. For extra enjoyment, extract the platters and use them as shiny garden ornaments/wind chimes.
Actually, the drive platters make poor wind chimes–they are too loud! Bong-clang instead of tinkle-tinkle. 😉 But, tied singly in fruit trees, do a bang-up job of keeping the birds away from the fruit. I spent 5 years making disk drives for HP, and have quite a few of the magmotor magnets hanging around (literally). The old Coyote magnets are very difficult to pry off surfaces–most everyone I know has bent and damaged refrigerator door sheetmetal because of it.
hapalochlaena, your method sounds far more sophisticated than mine: simply apply a hammer.
Not only hammering said hard drive into submission stress reduction, is is also a way to get punish your compy for all the bad, bad things it ever did and the many times it betrayed you!
Remember to save all the original files; so, you can share this ‘fun’ with some as-yet-unborn PhD candidate, who is writing her thesis on the development of C.J.Cherryh as shown in her early works. 🙂
I have sent all my manuscripts to the Jack Williamson Collection in Eastern New Mexico State University Golden Library. When the unsuspecting courier left my house in Oklahoma City, his pickup was loaded above the side-panels with a heap of manuscript boxes secured by bungees, and praying for no rain between Oklahoma and Portales, New Mexico.
The outtakes for Cyteen alone towered as a 3 foot stack of paper. Somewhere I have a photograph of that. Since we moved out of the lightning belt, and since the advent of the jump drive, I have become more reliant on computer files. You remind me that when I get through with the Matroushka Files, I should sent the librarian a dvd or two.
I was discussing this (computer file backups) with a friend at work. The best thing to do is to keep everything valuable on at least two hard drives. Resign yourself to buying a new one every 3 years or so (probably doubling the capacity), and move you oldest drive’s copy to it. That way you can also use newer file systems.
Most consumer disk drives are cheap and will not last for very long periods of time (actually they might, but the failure rate goes up). Since they’re in the $100-$150 range, it’s cheap insurance. Burnable media (CD, DVD) is also short-lifetime. After 3,4,5 years, the failure rate gets too high for long-term backup.
A final issue that is difficult — file formats. Over time, it’s quite easy to end up with unreadable files from programs that no longer exist (or be able to partially read a file). Using a common, standards based format can help. Text is, naturally, pretty universal but does not support formatting.
3 years, Aja Jin? The current estimate of a drive’s life is 1 year, in particular for anything a terrabyte or higher! If you’re not running RAID, you’re toast. Plain and simple: you MUST have redundant drives.
CJ, you might want to take a look at the processes behind what they do at Stanford, for when their “luminaries” are thinking of leaving. They’ve concluded that they need to have somebody explain what’s important, and interpret it for them. SALT is their program. It’s not got anything which would help you at the moment, but it’d change your perspective a bit, in terms of keeping things because they’re important to “posterity,” maybe. Dunno – perhaps you already think this way. I know that most of the people I study don’t.
@davimack — the 3 year period is about the longest “safe” interval. I’m assuming a drive that is not use heavily (mainly for backups). A two year lifespan should be pretty safe — the risk is low especially if you keep two solid backups. RAID is an option, but rebuild times are brutal for big drives like the 1TB spindles.
Well, and there are potential problems with ‘cloud’ computing—online storage. Just the other day the venerable Geocities succumbed to changing tech, the market, etc, and those who didn’t heed the (ample) warnings, suddenly found themselves with a problem—sites that weren’t backed up, particularly organizational sites, where a succession of webmasters meant no current Plan. I think we people who rely on the computer must live like vagabonds, with our little bundle of files packed up as best we can—but by my example, be warned about letting that bundle increase exponentially at every backup…the dreaded Matroushka Effect, no less. What I’m doing is creating something much more portable, and hopefully easier to back up.
While I wholeheartedly understand the allure of hammer to hardware and have frequently considered the possibility of an (almost) orgasmic experience to lobbing the damn thing out a window, I would like to remind folk that old systems can and should be recycled. Or you can donate them — I have a favorite local charity that works with disadvantaged kids [not just poor, but really bad familty situations] and have donated old systems after a very knowledgeable friend wipes and reconfigures everything so they don’t have to bother.
Maintaining an _understandable_ directory structure is important, so you can keep it from turning into a matrushka system.
I have folders within folders, sometimes three levels deep, but it’s a matter of keeping things organized to they don’t get mislaid. Programs that create files get their own folders to store those files in.
I have a DOS machine (not dead last I checked) that has 3 and 5-inch floppies, so I can transfer stuff by stages: 5 to 3, 3 to CD-burner. And a scanner … although the text I want most to scan is photocopied-typed-single-spaced with cross-outs and no bottom or right margins to speak of; it’s easier just to retype it.