lots of files

[John Larkin]

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a
nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr
currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to
delete a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making
$50 an hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to
delete 16.7 GB.

On the WABAC machine, people listened to the radio, on headphones, with
one diode junction. For a long time, a lot of people listened to the
radio on sets that had five "transistors" in them - each one dissipated
a few watts. Compare that to how many transistors are in a new
digitally-tuned AM/FM radio, that costs less, sounds better, and takes
a couple of watts.

Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2 or
3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

640 KB ought to be enough for anybody!

Matt Roberds

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless task
to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean things
up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2
or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

I just BD ripped and HD DVD ripped and transcoded 4TB this week. Almost
my entire collection. Then, I transcoded them down in res and file size
to play on any device, and yet still be as sharp as a tack.

2TB became a couple hundred GB for 175 flics. And I am still going and
haven't looked at my old DVD collection yet for gems from that stock.

Favorite watched film this week, and maybe for a long time very high in
my list...

42

I also watched "The Time Machine" this week, and was saddened to hear
about Rod Taylor's passing.

I liked "The Time Machine" far better than "The Birds", which everyone
seems to be acclaiming him for.

I think that Robin William's part in "Night At The Museum" had some
oddly prophetic lines in it for him. Or maybe he knew... way back then.

Anyway, I keep a drive for windows, and my other drives are separate.

Linux is far better about NOT bloating out your system drive. Microsoft
are just willy nilly idiots.

 

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

That's been true since disk drives were 20MB. Unless there is some
security concern, there is no point deleting files. $/MB gets smaller
much faster than I can fill the drives. The drives might just as well
be write once. ;-)

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

Probably. They're dirt cheap now. I have a 512MB SSD on my laptop
but also a couple of 500MB and a 3TB USB drive for backup and large
files. My entire CD library (ripped to MP3s) is on the laptop's 512MB
drive, too (no reason for it to be, really). Even that is trivial
space.

 

[Don Y]

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

<grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

The problem with bigger drives (esp under Windows) is when something goes
wrong, it takes *forever* to scan/repair!

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!

For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

No idea for the "Hardware Development" machine as I'm migrating that to
new iron, currently.

The appliance that runs most of my basic services, here, shows:
303,436 in the NetBSD repository for a total of 12,103,138KB (~12GB)
134,444 in the pkgsrc repository for a total of 1,767,980KB (~1.5GB)
Note that the pkgsrc repo doesn't contain any of the *sources* for
the packages.

And, I can't look at *my* repository cuz firing up that machine would
add way too much fan noise to the noise currently being generated by
my "Reference Documents" NAS box.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.

The problem with bigger drives (esp under Windows) is when something goes
wrong, it takes *forever* to scan/repair!

I have hot-plug RAID drives, and rotate them, so if things really get
trashed I can just plug in a drive that was dropped off a while ago.
Projects and mail are backed up to a network drive, a USB hard drive,
and Dropbox, so I can get back up pretty fast.

With the size of SD cards ever increasing, maybe we'll never delete
any pic from a still camera.

Some day we'll all walk around with a video cam recording every minute
of our lives. No more debates about who said what when.

I guess the hard drive is a serious civilization changer.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

On Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:21:24 +0000 (UTC), DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DLU1@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless task
to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean things
up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2
or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.


I just BD ripped and HD DVD ripped and transcoded 4TB this week. Almost
my entire collection. Then, I transcoded them down in res and file size
to play on any device, and yet still be as sharp as a tack.

2TB became a couple hundred GB for 175 flics. And I am still going and
haven't looked at my old DVD collection yet for gems from that stock.

"Unless I start collecting movies or something..."

Favorite watched film this week, and maybe for a long time very high in
my list...

42

Good flick but it's not one I have any interest in watching again.

I also watched "The Time Machine" this week, and was saddened to hear
about Rod Taylor's passing.

I liked "The Time Machine" far better than "The Birds", which everyone
seems to be acclaiming him for.

Liked the book. Movie, not so much. It was on the TeeVee during the
day a couple of weeks ago.

I think that Robin William's part in "Night At The Museum" had some
oddly prophetic lines in it for him. Or maybe he knew... way back then.

Another good flick, one I have watched more than once.

Anyway, I keep a drive for windows, and my other drives are separate.

Linux is far better about NOT bloating out your system drive. Microsoft
are just willy nilly idiots.

....as opposed to OS snobs

 

[Don Y]

On 1/9/2015 5:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!

It's not just the sources (though the NetBSD repo, below, *is* just
"sources" -- but, then again, that would be like having the sources
for all of *Windows* on your machine!) but, also, the tools to
create them (and the other materials that you may need *in* their
creation).

E.g., EMACS (a "text editor") clocks in at ~4,000 files. SfU (tools
that let Windows talk to and behave like my UN*X boxen) is ~12,000
files. Etc.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.

Interesting that you would think music *complicates* life!

The problem with bigger drives (esp under Windows) is when something goes
wrong, it takes *forever* to scan/repair!

I have hot-plug RAID drives, and rotate them, so if things really get
trashed I can just plug in a drive that was dropped off a while ago.
Projects and mail are backed up to a network drive, a USB hard drive,
and Dropbox, so I can get back up pretty fast.

You still have to rebuild the old drive. If it's a TB or more, this takes
a fair bit of time. And, move to a new machine and you're starting from
scratch (reinstalling all of your apps, etc.)

With the size of SD cards ever increasing, maybe we'll never delete
any pic from a still camera.

Ha! I put a 512M card in my other half's camera when she got it.
A few days later, complained it was full. OK, teach her to pull the
pictures off and store them on another drive. Replace 512M with 2G
(or was it 4G?) figuring it gives her a bit longer before she has to
repeat the exercise.

That was before I taught her how to use the "rapid shot" mode of the
camera to catch birds in flight (instead of trying to wait for the
right shot, etc.). So, now, instead of *one* (bad) photo of a bird,
she'll have half a dozen -- each slightly spaced from the others in time...

I suspect she now spends a day every two weeks moving photos off the
card, studying them, then filing them in suitable "folders". She
long ago gave up the idea of tagging each individual photo with search
terms (to make it easier to locate photos having specific content)
and now just plops them all in general folders (subject matter for
her paintings).

I'm sure she'll soon be complaining that the 500G drive she is currently
using is "full" and looking for me to extend it ("Delete some photos?
Why? How would I decide *which* ones to delete?")

Some day we'll all walk around with a video cam recording every minute
of our lives. No more debates about who said what when.

That's why we have email. Makes it much easier to archive discussions.
(I guess you could do similarly with audio -- but that seems a bit creepy)

> I guess the hard drive is a serious civilization changer.

Like most technologies, a double-edged sword. I sure like having my
music on a small disk instead of stacks of vinyl and CD's. And, nice
to replace my paperback library with ebook versions (that weigh a
helluvalot less than all that PAPER).

OTOH, if forced to stick with old audio, book, etc. formats, I'd probably
discard a lot more stuff!

 

On Friday, January 9, 2015 at 11:44:51 PM UTC, mrob...@att.net wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a
nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr
currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to
delete a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making
$50 an hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to
delete 16.7 GB.

yup... deleting is almost a lost game. If you've not done it, worth running a dupe finder once to catch the few biggest dupes.


NT

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:04:38 -0800) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
<nvm0bat0oremjetgpgd0b1t9nrqmorr24e@4ax.com>:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

Some time ago I realized that all the software I have ever written,
plus all the emails and postings, fit on one USB flash disk.

Harddisks, FLASH memory, optical disks, in a hundred years or less you will be forgotten.
I have some on M-DISC, and OK, 2 hundred years, if the technology to read those is still around.
Archaeologists will have fun with those thousands of years from now,
maybe they can get data back with better methods.

Technology moves on, for some old stuff you need to keep the tools with the projects.
Burn those to M-DISC, and just wipe the harddisks clean.

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2015 08:22:29 -0700, RobertMacy wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 16:04:38 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:



I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless task
to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

Rather than 'cull', I 'collect'

Transfer the whole huge mess somewhere as an achive, then go back and
get the ones that I want.

Use the same principle for office/lab 'cleanup'...take everything OUT of
the room(s), then bring back only as needed. Beauty is that the process
is pretty much automatic.

I get a new, bigger drive, mirror my main drive, and then expand it,
then, I mirror some other volumes and expand those. When I am done, I
have a new drive and a perfect backup snapshot. Sometimes I dump the old
drive and its volumes and make it a data drive, sometimes not.

So, I have twenty drives in the room, some old IDE, mostly SATA. My
machine has 6TB on it, and my i7 has an SATA hot swap bay which I place
2TB seagates into all the time, hot.

Currently I am toying with mSATA drives in USB3 enclosures as an OS
stick that boots up Linux on anything it gets put into.

 

[RobertMacy]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 16:04:38 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

So things will just grow, and I'll just buy bigger and bigger hard
drives, which further reduces the likelyhood that I'll ever clean
things up. Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking
that 2 or 3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

Rather than 'cull', I 'collect'

Transfer the whole huge mess somewhere as an achive, then go back and get
the ones that I want.

Use the same principle for office/lab 'cleanup'...take everything OUT of
the room(s), then bring back only as needed. Beauty is that the process is
pretty much automatic.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2015 23:44:19 +0000 (UTC), the renowned mroberds@att.net
wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a
nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr
currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to
delete a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making
$50 an hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to
delete 16.7 GB.

On the WABAC machine, people listened to the radio, on headphones, with
one diode junction. For a long time, a lot of people listened to the
radio on sets that had five "transistors" in them - each one dissipated
a few watts. Compare that to how many transistors are in a new
digitally-tuned AM/FM radio, that costs less, sounds better, and takes
a couple of watts.

Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2 or
3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

640 KB ought to be enough for anybody!

Matt Roberds

There are people now with 40-80T in their houses for movies etc. Wait
until 4K and 8K resolutions become popular.



Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, the renowned Don Y
<this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

My packrat XP computer has 1,404,271 files on it, in about 700G.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

 

[bitrex]

Spehro Pefhany <speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> Wrote in message:

On Fri, 9 Jan 2015 23:44:19 +0000 (UTC), the renowned mroberds@att.net
wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a
nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr
currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to
delete a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making
$50 an hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to
delete 16.7 GB.

On the WABAC machine, people listened to the radio, on headphones, with
one diode junction. For a long time, a lot of people listened to the
radio on sets that had five "transistors" in them - each one dissipated
a few watts. Compare that to how many transistors are in a new
digitally-tuned AM/FM radio, that costs less, sounds better, and takes
a couple of watts.

Unless I start collecting movies or something, I'm thinking that 2 or
3 TB might be a lifetime supply of disk storage.

640 KB ought to be enough for anybody!

Matt Roberds

There are people now with 40-80T in their houses for movies etc. Wait
until 4K and 8K resolutions become popular.



Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

I don't understand the point of using your own storage space for
commercial movies. Are there people who watch the same movie
over and over enough that the cost of purchasing it (assuming
theyre not pirating) and the space on the server to store it is
worth it? This is basically what cloud storage and streaming was
made for.

With services like Spotify I don't see a lot of point in keeping a
huge music library on disk either unless it's really obscure
material; with some devices you can even sync the online library
so you can listen offline...

--


----Android NewsGroup Reader----
http://usenet.sinaapp.com/

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 18:57:38 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 5:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

On 1/9/2015 4:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless
task to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

You obviously don't write code!

Well, I do some, but I use languages that tend to have one single
source file per program!

It's not just the sources (though the NetBSD repo, below, *is* just
"sources" -- but, then again, that would be like having the sources
for all of *Windows* on your machine!) but, also, the tools to
create them (and the other materials that you may need *in* their
creation).

E.g., EMACS (a "text editor") clocks in at ~4,000 files. SfU (tools
that let Windows talk to and behave like my UN*X boxen) is ~12,000
files. Etc.

grin> Silly boy. As you said originally, the problem is the effort
required to *delete* files means you never *shrink* your store to it's
current ACTUAL requirements.

Music is also a pig. I'm at about 500G for my music collection and
haven't finished ripping it all. (though if you opt for MP3 you can
cut that dramatically).

Fortunately, I don't listen to music. My life is complex enough
already.

Interesting that you would think music *complicates* life!

The problem with bigger drives (esp under Windows) is when something goes
wrong, it takes *forever* to scan/repair!

I have hot-plug RAID drives, and rotate them, so if things really get
trashed I can just plug in a drive that was dropped off a while ago.
Projects and mail are backed up to a network drive, a USB hard drive,
and Dropbox, so I can get back up pretty fast.

You still have to rebuild the old drive. If it's a TB or more, this takes
a fair bit of time. And, move to a new machine and you're starting from
scratch (reinstalling all of your apps, etc.)

With the size of SD cards ever increasing, maybe we'll never delete
any pic from a still camera.

Ha! I put a 512M card in my other half's camera when she got it.
A few days later, complained it was full. OK, teach her to pull the
pictures off and store them on another drive. Replace 512M with 2G
(or was it 4G?) figuring it gives her a bit longer before she has to
repeat the exercise.

We're doing a waveform generator box that uses a 128G class 10 SD card
to store waveforms. Long ago (like, 6 months) that was expensive.

We can read files at 10 to 12 Mbytes/sec, with a microZed/ZYNC board,
which is good enough for now.

That was before I taught her how to use the "rapid shot" mode of the
camera to catch birds in flight (instead of trying to wait for the
right shot, etc.). So, now, instead of *one* (bad) photo of a bird,
she'll have half a dozen -- each slightly spaced from the others in time...

Why did you do THAT?

Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without
a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution
to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

I suspect she now spends a day every two weeks moving photos off the
card, studying them, then filing them in suitable "folders". She
long ago gave up the idea of tagging each individual photo with search
terms (to make it easier to locate photos having specific content)
and now just plops them all in general folders (subject matter for
her paintings).

Cameras should have folders, too.

I'm sure she'll soon be complaining that the 500G drive she is currently
using is "full" and looking for me to extend it ("Delete some photos?
Why? How would I decide *which* ones to delete?")

Some day we'll all walk around with a video cam recording every minute
of our lives. No more debates about who said what when.

That's why we have email. Makes it much easier to archive discussions.
(I guess you could do similarly with audio -- but that seems a bit creepy)

I guess the hard drive is a serious civilization changer.

Like most technologies, a double-edged sword. I sure like having my
music on a small disk instead of stacks of vinyl and CD's. And, nice
to replace my paperback library with ebook versions (that weigh a
helluvalot less than all that PAPER).

The hard drive makes the Web useful. Enormous buildings are
constructed near power stations and dams, full of spinning disks. Some
small percentage of the power generated in the US powers hard drives.

All those unused, unsorted old files on mine are still spinning around
at thousands of RPMs, on multiple hard drives.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2015 11:27:13 -0500, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, the renowned Don Y
this@is.not.me.com> wrote:


For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

My packrat XP computer has 1,404,271 files on it, in about 700G.

Time for a disk cleanup!


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Don Y]

On 1/10/2015 10:42 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 18:57:38 -0700, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:
That was before I taught her how to use the "rapid shot" mode of the
camera to catch birds in flight (instead of trying to wait for the
right shot, etc.). So, now, instead of *one* (bad) photo of a bird,
she'll have half a dozen -- each slightly spaced from the others in time...

Why did you do THAT?

When you're trying to photograph, e.g., a Harris's Hawk doing something
*other* than perching on a branch or soaring in free flight (like, for
example, launching itself *off* it's perch so there is some dynamism
in the photo), you can't "go tight" (focus on *just* the hawk -- you
just can't hold a camera that steady nor expect the tree to remain so!)
and *hope* to snap the shutter at the instant it takes flight.

Instead, spend some time trying to catch it in a larger frame and
lean on the shutter release as soon as it "twitches". Later, look
through the shots to see which (if any) caught the action you sought.

Set her camera resolution down, to a couple megapixels maybe. Without
a tripod and a really good lens, vibration and optics limit resolution
to far less than modern cameras can theoretically do.

Doesn't work. When you later try to enlarge and crop the photo to
isolate *just* the hawk (in the above example), you end up losing
all the detail. She's not interested in "lots of sky" with a speck
of a bird in it, etc.

Likewise, she'll take a photograph of running water and enlarge and
crop some *tiny* section-of-interest to show a particularly interesting
pattern of water swirling around a branch or some other obstruction
in it's path...

I suspect she now spends a day every two weeks moving photos off the
card, studying them, then filing them in suitable "folders". She
long ago gave up the idea of tagging each individual photo with search
terms (to make it easier to locate photos having specific content)
and now just plops them all in general folders (subject matter for
her paintings).

Cameras should have folders, too.

Complicates the UI/UX. People like her just want to "click click"
and not think twice about which photos belong together -- or not.
That's what the time at home in front of the PC is all about.

In her case, I think the best gain would be to let me put a larger
monitor on that machine so she can see more, BIGGER thumbnails in
each screenful. But, she has very definite opinions about what
she wants on *her* desk... <shrug>

 

[Don Y]

On 1/10/2015 2:10 AM, meow2222@care2.com wrote:

On Friday, January 9, 2015 at 11:44:51 PM UTC, mrob...@att.net wrote:
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
I have roughly 70,000 files on my C: drive. It would be a hopeless task
to go through them and delete the useless ones, saving some few
kilobytes or megabytes per file.

I can drive across town and buy a 6 TB hard drive for $300, which is a
nickel a gigabyte. If you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr
currently), and you spend one minute deleting files, you'd need to delete
a bit over 2.4 GB to make it worth your time. If you're making $50 an
hour, and you spend one minute deleting files, you need to delete 16.7
GB.

yup... deleting is almost a lost game. If you've not done it, worth running
a dupe finder once to catch the few biggest dupes.

I think you'll find it doesn't pay for the time it takes to run!

Even if you find a true duplicate, you have to then sit down and ask
yourself "does this second (third?) copy need to be *here* for some
reason? Would I break anything if I moved it??"

Similarly, do I *need* to keep the last version of this program around?
Am I *ever* likely to need it? Why not just stick with -CURRENT and
forget all that came before??

Then, consider: OK, if I get rid of it, I recover a bit of space on
a medium that is essentially *free*. And, at the same time, run the risk
that if I *need* it at a later date and can't *get* another copy of it...

 

[Don Y]

Hi Spehro,

On 1/10/2015 9:27 AM, Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:13:58 -0700, the renowned Don Y
this@is.not.me.com> wrote:

For my "Software Development" (Windows) machine:
548,492 on my C: drive for ~89GB
and that's *just* executables, no "user content" (though it includes
library sources from vendors, etc.)

My packrat XP computer has 1,404,271 files on it, in about 700G.

I don't keep "everything" (or even "much of ANYTHING"!) on a single
computer -- nor a single spindle. Instead, I scatter things around
based on how they are likely to be needed (referenced).

E.g., my lossless music archive is in one place; lossy (mp3) in
another. Research/academic OS's here; commercial/FOSS OS's there.
Novels one one drive; research papers on another. Etc.

Then, duplicate (not sector-by-sector) each onto a second spindle.

This lets me keep only the copies that I need "spinning" at any
given time -- and, only long enough to retrieve stuff (or add stuff).

Notable exception is a pair of "shelf's" that I use -- plus the two
"repository machines" (WABAC1 and WABAC2).

In the past, I did this with a hodgepodge of COTS NAS boxen, odds-n-ends
pressed into service as file servers, etc.

I am now favoring small-ish (<TB) external (USB/FW) drives with a
"common" filesystem format that I can physically move from machine to
machine. So, if a box dies, I don't lose access to everything that
the box was spinning -- just unplug the drive(s) and attach them to
another box.

[This was particularly troublesome with the COTS NAS boxen as they
were essentially closed systems. And, their RAID/etc. was effectively
useless as if the box died, then the array supported *by* the box was
inaccessible! "Yeah, I've got redundancy in the media, but the
means of getting *at* it are TOAST!"]

Given that I'm not looking for "performance", I can afford to put
two mirror volumes on different machines and rsync(1) them when
I'm adding to the archive.

<shrug> REAL solution is to just dump all this stuff and take up
gardening or some other "less involved" activity! :>

In more practical terms, the real solution is to start bundling
groups of files in larger containers. E.g., ISO's and tarballs.
Of course, the exact opposite was preferable when machines and
networks were slower -- retrieving a 600MB ISO *just* to pull
a 10KB file off of it was costly!

(Ideally, I'd build something that would allow me to automount ISO's
transparently so I could package *everything* that way and still
have existing software access their contents as if individual files;
e.g., like my repositories!)

Gardening sounds a lot easier...