Follow Thru Thursdays! Data Hording Diet Challenge!

Not simply a new year, 2020 marks the unofficial start of a new decade! Consequently our commitment to newness should be 10x. And in order to make room for future success we should eradicate the clutter of the past. On a practical level, for me this means mending my data hording ways. Making room for the future means freeing up space on my Network Attached Storage. Eradicating the clutter of the past means deleting terabytes of unnecessary files. I challenge you to do the same!

At some point, I don’t know how, I don’t know when, my Windows 10 desktop stopped recognizing my NAS4FREE NAS as a network location. Weeks of computer wrestling ensued. I found and followed every [SOLVED] forum post on the subject but to no avail. This made any sort of efficient backing up of my work nearly impossible, certainly impractical. The best solution I could come up with, short of buying additional hardware, was to open up FTP services on the NAS. Confronted with 53 MiB/s transfer rates, however, meant that temporarily backing up everything to my PC while I switched NAS OSes would be a week long affair at least.

It was obvious I’d have to delete the majority of data being horded on the NAS drives. The month’s nearly over and I have several incomplete resolutions to return to. So, I couldn’t spend too much time debating or sifting through folders in search of happy memories. The cuts had to be ruthless in order to be fast.

Some decisions were easy. I used to be super obsessive with system backups. But size-wise they’re too big and bulky. Am I ever going to have the need to revisit Vista? Windows 7? Just to be able to play Simpsons Hit and Run? Or can I trust that it will be re-released for the Switch? In the end the decision was made to delete every system backup except the most recent. If you yourself are holding on to lots of system backups, why? Get rid of them!

A more difficult decision was whether or not to fuss over older, inactive NCP work products such as Dream Casters’ Duel. Previously every time I migrated the DCD work product across disks I would obsess. I made sure every single file made its way safely to the new destination. This is in part because I was once bitten and twice shy of losing some very important promotional art materials. But these days that art is looking dreary and dated. And I never had the resources to create a multi-player third-person hero based brawler in the first place. Because of a variety of catastrophes (not the least of which is cancer) that position has not improved.

So. very. long. ago.

Consequently the decision was made not to be too precious about tracking down DCD files. Whatever was on my desktop was fine. It goes in the inactive folder. 🙁 Putting DCD to sleep marks the end of the era for Nickel City Pixels. As new decades tend to do, they end eras. Are there any projects that you’ve been overly sentimental about? Take the Data Hording Diet Challenge!

The Data Hording Diet Challenge:

  • Get rid of all those unnecessary systems backups
  • Put inactive projects to sleep: archive or delete
  • Run duplicate file detection and delete all redundancies (I recommend Duplicate Cleaner Pro as it uses MD5 checksums for its determinations)
  • Re-organize directories for optimal use
  • Of what now remains, backup only what is absolutely necessary

Yes, we’ve all suffered having thrown something away and having need of it the next day. And yes, we’ve all thrown out some sentimental knick-knack then come to regret it. But data hording is both time and space consuming, and thus a hurdle to success. Launch headlong into the new decade by taking the Data Hording Diet Challenge! I’d be very interested in hearing how much HD space you free up.

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