<p dir="ltr">If you have software that requires the floppy format for installation (for example the tie fighter game for DOS and its copy protection) there exists virtual floppy drives that store the images on a USB flash drive. Not directly related to your question but still interesting.</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Aug 6, 2014 9:11 AM, "Chris Fowler" <<a href="mailto:cfowler@outpostsentinel.com">cfowler@outpostsentinel.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
This is not the first time I've attempted backing up everything I've created over 20 years.<br>
<br>
Every so often someone I do not know emails me for a file, software, etc that I may have based on what they read on a mailing list archive. Last night someone requested a file from a project I was working on back in 2002.<br>
<br>
Looking for this file I am reminded about how much crap I really have. I have floppies, CDs, DVDs, etc of backups, data, and whatever. Many of these have dupes. I want to copy all this stuff to a hard drive then archive it. I need to deal with these duplicates.<br>
<br>
A year ago I wrote a perl program to locate the duplicates using md5 hashes. I was then going to delete all, but one of the dupes. The problem I ran into is that some of these could be installs of software and I needed to keep the dupe. I was then wasting time manually determining which ones to delete and which ones to keep.<br>
<br>
Last night I had an idea that may work. Create a directory of the root of the backup named 'dupes'. Copy the dupe once into that directory. Every where else replace the dupe with a symbolic link.<br>
<br>
My biggest issue with backups is management of the data. At 40 I'll copy something today and 6 months from now forget why I even did that. It could be a 1GB SVN software tree I checked out, made some changes for testing and then decided not to delete it. Now I have 1GB of stuff I feel like I can not delete. I can't even remember why I made the copy. Ugh.<br>
<br>
I have so many CDs and DVDs stacked in my office it would be nice to get rid of them. I have drives in boxes that I've forgotten what is on them. I'm a tech hoarder.<br>
<br>
Chris<br>
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