29-JUNE-2015
This self identified project lasted for three weeks. It took 2-3 hours a day during this period. I don’t remember being this intensely
focused on a home project recently. It
was monotonous but demanded diligence of repairing a watch. This is about
uncluttering of our digital shelves. I
would have planned my housekeeping differently if I ever predicted the ways
technologies around us changed in last fifteen years.
Years back, unreliable PC hard drives demanded a reliable external backup. That’s how the files slowly started to accumulate. Writing files in to CDs were common fifteen years ago because external hard drives were heavy and expensive. So we had about three dozen CDs with all kind of file folders- music, excel, word, pdf, pictures and videos of various formats. Files were smaller in those days and we kept only important ones because it took time to cut a CD with those 6x and 12x drives. That changed when we bought our first external hard drive in 2006. A faster SCSI drive that duplicated files easier.
A lot changed in the devices front too. We owned four or five PCs/laptops, ranging
from single user windows 3.1 to multi-user Windows 8. It was nice to have own login and work areas
for each member in the family but it also meant files stored in multiple
locations. Applications like iTunes and Picasa work in user silos and helped to
generate more duplicates. Smart phones with increased memory, pixels and video capabilities
made capturing every moment easy. Every
time we connect these devices to back-up; we leave the downloaded files in the
device, because that’s the default action.
Next time we download them all over again to a different folder thinking
to clean them up later. The monster DSLR cameras with 1082 video capabilities
contributed more to the folder size as the iPhones added more to the file
counts.
We watched social media revolution in terms of the files we
received in our devices. Started with pictures from friends over the world,
audio and video clips. They came through email, Viber, What’s App , Facebook
and google plus . We kept local copies of some fearing these companies may die
without a notice.
Digital paranoia was creeping on ever since we had our baby six years ago. Volume of pictures and videos tripled compared to previous years. We saved them all to save every invaluable dot in the memory lane. Media prices dropped dramatically so there was no concern of storage so good or bad, every snap, and every video, stayed on. The result was a clutter of CDs, flash drives, Laptops, and external hard drives with files piled up everywhere.
It’s a relief that all my files are hoarded away somewhere.
But when I really wanted something, retrieving was painful. We always wanted to look at some older
pictures or video from a trip or event, but the grind discouraged us from even
trying. Finding a file meant I connect an external drive or load a CD and
search them by dates or whatever and many times it simply did not work. With a
large volume of pictures and video files, there was never enough time to go
through each one of them. Future looked grim
and it was time to do a onetime clean-up and organize ourselves.
We assembled the CDS, flash drives, and external hard drives
and sifted through the folders after folders.
Dump back-ups from the laptops were the worst and we owned four
laptops. I changed five jobs and there
were documentations accumulated at each place – training materials, manuals,
performance appraisals and more than anything immigration documents. Sheena had
her share from her work too. Then we had bank statements and tax related
documents. A lot of these documents were modified and copied over multiple
times. It took several hours to simply
copy the files into a central location. At the end we had 4800 folders and
85,000 files totals 400 GB. Just eyeballing the folders and removing the
obvious duplicates reduced the size to almost half.
Knowing that bulk of content is in duplicate, next search was for a program that identifies and remove duplicates. After trying a couple of freeware I settled on Auslogics Duplicate File Finder. It had an intuitive interface, a checksum match feature that looks for similar content –regardless name or date created, and several useful options to delete as a batch. It also worked faster than many I tested. While searching for the duplicates, soon I realized that we need to plan better. It was inefficient to scan several folders with a large number of files in one go as it could take hours and deleting slowed down exponentially as the recycle bin filled up. So it was important to start with one folder, search and delete duplicates, clean-up the recycle bin and add another folder into the duplicate search. So weeks later, we had about 27,000 files across a large number of folders.
Dismantling the folders and grouping them to more logical folders was another major task. For the documents, we grouped them by employer, tax related, references etc. Initially music, video and picture files were grouped separately but later pictures and videos were sorted into yearly vintage- for instance, all the pictures and videos from year 2014 were lumped into one folder. However, some major events deserved standalone folder –like our wedding or first birthday of Tara or our coast- to- coast road trip. What I had in mind while creating this structure is the way Amazon Cloud organizes content. When uploaded, each of these folders becomes an album and it’s easier to browse them in the timeline.
The toughest leg of the project started just after the consolidation of non-duplicates into folders. Tossing the unnecessary documents out was rather easy. Pictures are a different story. Every folder had around 1500 images in it and there was this confusion of what to get rid of. It is clear by now that more pictures are not helping the very cause why we took this pictures for. It’s quite unlikely that we will have time to sit through hours to see them all. So the rule is everything that’s shaky, faded, near duplicate and the ones with no story to tell have to be deleted.
Picasa photo viewer software helped save some clicks. It’s possible to delete a picture from its slideshow mode so I had my one finger in forward arrow key and one in delete and started reviewing. I stop two seconds on a picture and then make a keep/delete decision. Say about 3000 pictures on a 2 hour session, over 5 days. At the end, the number of pictures was reduced to 40% of the initial size. Sheena took up the videos. Videos took more time to review and finished over several weeks. So weeks later, we were in a better shape with 23,000 files; pictures, videos and other documents.
We signed up with Amazon Prime cloud services and uploaded them all. Our phones are now in sync with the amazon cloud so they are backed-up periodically. We also got an amazon fire stick so it helps stream videos and pictures in to our living room TV. It’s a pleasure to watch our little one browsing through her own baby pictures and videos using a remote, effortlessly.
