Dormant Social Media Life While Sorting Through Drives

Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.

From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social. It’s during the pandemic that social media seemed to die. I think that social media relies on meeting people in the physical world to have value. People on the social web use it when they’re on the toilet, or waiting for something else to happen. They’re just filling small gaps in their schedule.

Plenty of Potential Storage

The other reason is more positive. I have terabytes of storage spread across twenty two drives, or more and I am re-organising everything in order to see how much space I have free. I have at least twenty terabytes of data storage. I might have as much as fourty two terabytes of storage but due to file duplications I don’t have much space that is free.

Required for Video Projects

That’s frustrating, especially if you want to take video and can generate up to 64 gigabytes of data at a time. 64 gigabytes, because my Sxs cards have that amount of storage. The drone could have up to 512 gigabytes of storage if I put the right SD card into the camera.

Freeing Cloud Space

I can’t delete data from cloud storage solutions because I haven’t consolidated all of my photo and video files from iCloud, Flickr, Google Photos and one or two other services. If all of my files are organised chronologically then I can migrate from cloud storage solutions without worrying about losing images that might have been backed up only to iCloud, or Google Photos, or another solution.

By consolidating the data offline, I can manage data in the cloud with ease.

Shrodinger’s Storage Cat

For data to be safe you need to have two local copies, and one offsite backup. If you have a dozen, or two dozen drives then that data is like shrodinger’s cat. You don’t know whether it’s backed up (living) or a single copy (dead). Delete the wrong file and you might end up losing a few days, or a few months of data. By having a centralised main storage your small satellite drives become working drives. You use them while you’re working on a project, and once the project is over you move it to the main storage solution and either wipe and reuse that drive, or keep it as a backup. Shrodinger’s cat has left the storage device.

Looking Forward

Years ago I bought an eight terabyte drive because I planned to consolidate my personal video and photo files but I never got around to it. This morning I finished moving the junk I had on that drive to other drives and I have now started to backup the video and photo data that I had temporarily kept on a five terabyte drive. I realised that I have more data than would fit on a five terabyte drive, but it also failed to mount at least once.

For years I had the same data on five to six drives but in my move towards centralising, and then backing up my data I made myself unsafe. I was left with just one copy of data. Now that I am backing up the four terabytes of data I have from the five terabyte drive to the 8 terabyte drive I have a little margin of safety.

Consolidation

When moving files from the 5tb drive to the 8tb drive the process is simple. Move the video folde to the video folder, photo to photo, and documents to documents. It’s when I start moving the secondary drives to the main drive to consolidate my photos and videos that the value is generated because this is when I detect duplicate folders, videos and photos. This is when the value comes in.

Moving four terabytes of data takes hours, but once that data is moved, and as I consolidate data from six or seven other drives I will copy only the files that do not exist on the main volume. I will then move the files that I have checked into a zz-backed-up folder.

Low Value

When I was trying to free space on drives I deleted the files from the drive as soon as they were copied over. Now I am moving them to zz-backed-up as a scruffy backup. The aim is to be able to recover files if the 8tb volume fails, but these are a stop gap. The next step is to backup the 8 tb volume.

And Finally

Nothing is backed up until you have at least two copies locally, and a third off-site copy. The next step is to copy the files from an older volume to a newer volume. Old drives fail, so having files on older volumes is a risk. When I finish consolidating files to the eight terabyte volume I will then duplicate it to a newer 8TB volume.

As a side project, once I have two or more drives that are free of data I could experiment with setting up a raid system.