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isn't this why they invented powerpoint?
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RB-GB
Got my site back up after my time in the woods!
JaxCoder.com
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Where's rg;bg (colourful language)?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I would like to get some ideas from the people here on the topic of organizing data. In my immediate case, I have too many disparate files in too many disparate locations to be truly and effectively useful to me.
There are a zillion files, sprinkled among....
- My Desktop Computer's hard drive
- My Phone
- A Bunch Of Thumb Drives
- My Notebook computer
- Two Separate External Hard Drives
The disorganization presents complexities that astound me.
i.e., How did I ever let this mess develop to this point ?
Something tells me that I am not the only one dealing with this sort of problem.
I'm looking for thoughts from folks here on the root cause of Data Disorganization, like thoughts and habits that we fall into way back at the start of it all, along with some ideas about minor habits that go along with reversing the process so it doesn't start again.
Your thoughts ?
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C-P-User-3 wrote: I'm looking for thoughts from folks here on the root cause of Data Disorganization
Optimization of spending energy. If there's no obvious reward to doing it "the right way", you will stop doing it.
It does not have to be a single location; all my photo's are on a thumb-drive, projects on an external USB drive, and there's an "unorganized" folder on the desktop. Use it for the moments where you have "no time" to do it right, to postpone it for later that week.
Have a similar "unorganized" folder on your laptop/notebook, and move the contents to the unorganized folder on the main-PC whenever you connect to the network.
Bonuspoints if you write an application for synchronizing/archiving the contents of the folder 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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The easiest thing to do is to organise your files and backups.
Mine is all organised on my machine in a set directory structure (personal, work, business, entertainment, ebooks, old stuff),
- shadowed onto a second drive in the same machine,
- shadowed to an eqivalent directory structure in a backup machine,
- and backed up onto pairs of external drives.
Thumb drives and/or phone are only for transporting files to/from work sites (and usually I'll email or dropbox a copy for myself for that too.)
Also all files pertaining to clients are also kept on one of their machines (normally the one I use for dev/test - Sometimes encrypted if I don't want them poking around in it.)
the hardest thing to do is discipline yourself to maintain that organisation.
Anything updated away from my main copy is daily added back to my main machine (thumb drive for safety/first level backup but usually I email it (or a dropbox link if large) to myself.
- because I already have a habit check my email daily I see and immediately act on filing that new copy to my "master"
- backup to external drives, depends on the amount of changes, absolutely minimum weekly but often daily.
- backup to backup machine - weekly (weekends) - my backup machine is also my entertainment box (connected to TV = bigger screen). My main machine would already be on as even in weekends I check email before sports / movies & beer o'clock, easy to mount the network drives and run the update script.
How to make backups easier
Of course use a proper backup software and scripts, just backup everything - no "should I add this? do I have that?" worries, who cares, O/S and all just back it up.
(except to the backup machine to which I only backup all the non-system folders)
- Go for SSD (yes for external drives too) - main reason people don't do backups is takes so damn long. SSD's fix that - the longest part of doing my backups to external is plugging the things in, (USB 3.1 gen 2), even if I've copied a database for testing (lets say 10G) it's still all done in a few minutes - try that on a spinner or for real fun a thumb drive.
SSD drives, including SSD externals - I can't stop saying this, throw away your spinners.
when backups only take seconds (faster than you can get yourself a cup of coffee) it's no longer a chore that you put off until tomorrow coz you're to shagged.
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Lopatir wrote: SSD drives, including SSD externals - I can't stop saying this, throw away your spinners.
when backups only take seconds (faster than you can get yourself a cup of coffee) it's no longer a chore that you put off until tomorrow coz you're to shagged.
How's your data recovery from the SSD's when things go awry? Spinning rust allows for data recovery in a lot of scenarios. SSD's mean pretty much instant data death thanks to TRIM.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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that's why everything is doubled. I want the speed.
... hardware is replaceable, time not so much.
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Lopatir wrote: SSD drives, including SSD externals - I can't stop saying this, throw away your spinners.
when backups only take seconds (faster than you can get yourself a cup of coffee) it's no longer a chore that you put off until tomorrow coz you're to shagged.
My backups typically run overnight; it doesn't matter to me how long they take.
And even though they've been dropping in price, spinners are still far cheaper than SSDs. If I wanted to get an extra set of backup drives for everything I have, I'd need about 24TB (I'm being lazy and not separating out copies of my own ripped DVD purchases as part of my backup set). The last set of 8TB drives I bought (best price/capacity ratio I found at the time) was $180 each ($540). With some arm-twisting, I could justify that.
A quick Amazon search shows that 4TB SSDs are still ridiculously expensive ($850; I'd need 6 of them, or $5100). 2TB SSDs are much more reasonable ($380--I have one to host VMs), but then I'd need 12 of them, so that makes $4560. At over 8x the price, I can't justify that.
My NAS is all spinners and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Spinners (even accessed across my LAN) are plenty fast to stream movies as I watch them in realtime; same for music. To me it never made any sense to put things that don't need extra-fast access on SSDs.
Of course it's all a matter of needs and volume, so YMMV. I'm just objecting to blanket statements such as "throw away your spinners", is all. Anyone you can convince should send them to me; I could use them as extra backups. :-p
(And yes, all of this goes out the window the instant the price/capacity ratio of SSDs beats spinning disks...I'm still patiently waiting for that day)
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actually I'll give you the media library is still a case for spinners (given volume required for the price as you point out). Not much else though.
NAS too is OK for spinners, as you say with backups automated seeing as they are on 24/7.
My take was OP was speaking to active files required and updated daily (so unlikely to be GB's), ... some on pc, some on laptop, some on thumbs and even on the phone - my points really came down to:
1. choose a master (likely the PC),
2. make it a habit to maintain that master up-to-date, (tip: use email to spur that action)
3. to make 2 less of a chore use the fastest solution(s) you can get
(because if it is a huge chore, well we humans are naturally lazy creatures so...)
BTW: Personally I've given up on the media library - kept too many things that I would never look at again (too much to feasibly watch), and seeing as really cheap access to older content comes bundled with the various movie/tv subscriptions even more didn't see the point
- but that's my way, absolutely not saying everyone should do this - luckily we [nearly] all live in a world we we can choose to our own preferences.
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Lopatir wrote: and seeing as really cheap access to older content comes bundled with the various movie/tv subscriptions
You mean like Ultraviolet, which have recently emailed me to tell me they were shutting down their service and I was going to lose access to my purchased DVD/Blu-ray streaming option unless I somehow find the means to transfer what they think I own to another provider?
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I would call it Data Compartmentalization rather than Data Disorganization.
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If it wasn't for disorganization I wouldn't have any organization at all.
Got my site back up after my time in the woods!
JaxCoder.com
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As I've said in the past, a cheap rationalization is better than none at all. 
Software Zen: delete this;
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As far as sharing files between your desktop and your laptop, here is my strategy:
My setup involves a file server but it's not required. My desktop uses mapped drives to the server where all development projects, docs, etc. lives. My laptop uses the same mapped drives, but with one difference...they are configured to be available offline. I also use an external drive for customer databases and documents. That drive is either plugged into the desktop or travels with the laptop for the one day a week that I use it. Before taking the laptop home, I make sure that it synchs with the server. This means that I'm always working with the same files on either machine. A nice side-effect is that you basically have an automatic backup on the laptop.
I've used this method for a long time and it works well enough for my needs. It actually saved my bacon a few years ago when my server's data drive went kaput.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Admit you've got a problem? Come to the conclusion that there is no root cause of it. Like you said, you started somewhere other than where you thought you'd end up ... here with so many files. What do you need a diagnosis for anyway? Why did you get a computer in the first place? Were you comparing the calculating abilities of your Ti-89 to the abilities of the calculator that came with Windows Accessories? Then found you had a lot of space left on your 1 GB PATA and decided to store converted .avi from your camcorder because the box also had a slot on the motherboard to add a Firewire card which made it easy to do so? There were tons of free applications available for download on the internet to do things with a computer, do them better than anything also found in Accessories, so you began to think you could write software just as good as either? My head first exploded when I began to have to pay for software to write software. Then the outlay of funds became the delimiter of my disorganization itself. So ... there. The disorganization you're probably talking about is much greater than your own and SHOULDN'T be a cause for concern. Get a hobby?
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It looks like life happened to you?
And endless struggle and pull-o-war between chaos and organisation! 
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What you're running into is one of the fundamental failures of computer systems. Computer's have no clue what they are storing! In fact, my industry (the storage industry) seems to think that all we need to provide you is a directory and a filename and you should worship us. In reality, people don't want to work with files, they want to work with something called Information Assets. These are collections of files, metadata, people, processes, emails, etc., that as a set, are meaningful to your or your business. These things change, are related to one another, are part of larger sets, etc. This is how people think, talk, communicate with others, and yet computer's don't even come close to supporting this type of behavior.
If you would like to see more about the idea of Information Assets with an example, here is a link to a short paper on the subject. "www.expeditefile.com/assets/assetmanagementpart1v2.pdf" - Introduction To Information Asset Management. It is a no-register PDF.
There are a huge number of other failures that are caused by this wrong information model. However, what's worse is the industry forces every computer owner to go figure out their own way to maintain the integrity of their "digital assets". That's why you have seen multiple suggestions on how to do backup, etc.
What you have touched on is a huge issue that I'm afraid, very few people understand much less have any way to solve. Hopefully, we will be able to fix this someday... 
Bruce
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One word cloud.
I have a One Drive biz account.
Everything important is stored there in a logical tree structure.
I make sure I have two computers that can sync the entire one drive. And every month or so I copy to an external drive then turn the drive off.
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Step 1.
Dump every piece of clothing you own on the bed.
Go through each piece, if it does not spark joy, put it in the discard pile
otherwise put it in the keep pile.
etc.
Eventually, you will make it to your hard drive.
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Anything that gives me pause, gets copied to a cloud drive and / or a dedicated external drive.
Copy over the outlook pst files once in a while. Share a cloud folder or two. That's it.
Just attach a "generation #" to the file if there is going to be a collision.
Once you have x generations, start deleting the older ones.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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44. She backs American leader (5)
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44) SUSAN?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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