[ale] archiving backups

[Jim Kinney]

+1 :-(

I'm doing "THE PURGE". Very little code is being kept. I grep for my name
as I only added that for decently sized projects. The rest are the zillions
of one-offs that are easier to redo than find.

Then the fun begins. I added a text blurb to a file with the name, path and
description of each code set I'm keeping.  The only code I'm keeping not
written by me is specialty stuff that I use or it took eons to find or
(this is where it gets ugly) I can no longer find a source for. I treat all
of this the same as my stuff.
Once located, I add those paths to by backup process. I then delete on disk
duplicates.

Wish I had done this a decade ago
On Aug 6, 2014 9:11 AM, "Chris Fowler" <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:

> This is not the first time I've attempted backing up everything I've
> created over 20 years.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Chris
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