Proper actual archiving
hell. No other way to type it. Files are arranged by year. In each annual folder
there are sub-folders by topic. Those topics rarely change. There’s an archive
set-up folder to make setting up next year’s archive easy. That’s more or
less it. Except…
I always have a miscellaneous folder.
Random stuff rolls into the digital archive, trailing electronic bits of dust. Where
else am I going to sweep that digital detritus? Into a dedicated miscellaneous
file folder.
The folder names rarely change, year by year.
Here’s one for fiction with the number of the year attached. There’s another
for official business. Occasionally, and it is usually for technical reasons, there’ll
be a folder dealing with A THING that crops up once.
Wasn’t needed before.
Won’t be needed again. (But it remains in
case that isn’t true later, Future Boy.)
Too specific to be miscellaneous.
Jumps out at you from the regular archive
listings.
Every few years, I have a clearout. Things, stored
away out of sight and beyond mind, must leave the house in a cloud of debris. That’s
the tangible world for you. Full of things. This gadget and that thingummy.
Those rum-tee-tums.
How goes it in the digital world? I archive stuff.
It is backed up. At year’s end I make sure it is definitely backed up even
more, in case computers fail me. Then the year is sealed. I dive back into it if
I need something. But it is done. A year, plopped into a digital jar and
sealed, is now electronic preserve, electric jam, and megabyte marmalade.
*
Dimly, a thought catches
fire and races in my direction. When bookshelves reach saturation, I reorganise.
Somehow I conjure space from out of a hat. Yet I don’t do this sort of thing digitally.
The files grow larger and larger. Duplication of effort is real. I’ve tinkered with
the clearing of duplicate files in the past, it’s true.
But that was all cosmetic. I haven’t had a proper
full-on clearout of digital files. The time is upon me. If not now, when? Never.
I’ve booked the twelfth.
*
Yes, I know there’s
stuff in there that’s no longer relevant. It wasn’t relevant to begin with, but
I held on. For fear of deleting the wrong file, I left the woodlands of knowledge
untended and now a forest lies before me. I’m not here to go logging. Just…
It’s time to clear a few paths. Remove fallen
trees. Tidy up. And make sure the archive is usable after the clearout. It’s usable
now. But it feels as though the whole thing is stacked in boxes. Crooked boxes.
Those boxes at the back. Boxes that haven’t seen digital daylight in a dragon’s
age.
Sifting through files is going to take eternity
and…five minutes. The last five minutes will kill me. What will I discover? Files.
Half-files. People, places, objects, things, ideas…
And…miscellaneous electronic fluff.
*
For a time, I grabbed
blank files and named them with ideas that I didn’t have time to write down in numbing detail…
Yes, it’s true. You can’t just delete blank files.
The blank file with a title is the thing you should keep and expand upon.
There are files in old formats and back-ups of
things I couldn’t describe. For evil reasons of evil archiving evilness, there are
duplicates of duplicates that I know aren’t quite exact duplicates. Most of
those must die. Sifting, sifting, sifting. All I’ll end up doing is one long shift…full
of sift.
*
I could let it go.
Leave the archive as it is. Not doing any harm. As it grows large enough to engulf
a continent, I realise the archive is a continent of cloned city states. Not
good. Eventually, the sheer size of the duplicated archive will do me harm. I
won’t be able to cross it in a week, not even by train.
If I institute
a proper digital clearout, though…no more meddling or tinkering or mending and amending…
Then it’ll be DONE done. All the deeper archived
years need treated but the once. Those carry the least duplication, sit in the
smallest folders, and offer the weakest troubles. Now I have a line of
thinking, and I can apply it to the later, more complex, years.
Yes, this is a polite fiction that I cling to.
Yet it is mine to cling to. For the later files, there’s a grand plan. I’m going
in there with dynamite and a flamethrower and it won’t be nice. But it will be not
nice just the once.
And once I start working on eradicating
duplication, what then? The smoke clears, and? I’ll have organised
things…differently. With years put to bed, down in the vaults, do I need to
stick to the same level of organisation?
It’s not meant to be a historical record, or
a hysterical one. Will I organise past files by year in main annual folders? Perhaps,
once I’ve rendered the data dead in the vaults, it’s time for me to stake those
folders through their undying hearts.
Complete reorganisation. I have the digital storage
space handy. All I’m lacking is the willpower to tackle the labours of Herakles.
This isn’t a job I’ll do in one swift burst. It’ll be planned, then left to rot
in the weeds. I’ll rescue that plan and remove the worst of the rust.
One of the main problems with technology is the
technology. The archive is an archive of the technological past. Files were stored
in sub-archives that could be backed up onto a DVD. This is why a lot of data bubbles
burst near the upper limit of five gigabytes of information. A DVD held just under
five.
My earliest archives could stand backing up to
a CD…with an annual archive measured in megabytes, rather than gigabytes. Your overall
load is the capacity of your current bucket, as usual. My bucket has been a
large external hard drive for a long time, now.
What does it mean? I haven’t backed up an archive
to DVD in a dragon’s age. It would mean breaking an archive into sub-folders of
sub-folders to cope with data in five gigabyte chunks. I’m not going back to that.
What am I staring into, this abyss of knowledge?
Why, I’m staring at an abyss of knowledge. I’m
looking at the prospect of taking a bunch of those early data-splintered archives
and mashing them together into one folder that’s larger than five gigabytes…a number
that no longer matters. The archive isn’t about keeping a record of how I stored
the archive itself. It’s about convenience in filing. Away with the hysterical
historical record.
Once Windows 10 came along, I found the
search function…less useful…shall we say. It’s one of those wonderful improvements
that have the casual computer user hankering for a golden age that never was. I’m
sure there’s a way to make it less fiddly.
For me, the archive will be less fiddly if I
tidy the bugger up. Ah, optimism. I anticipate filing Armageddon. It can’t possibly
be easy. Nothing is straightforward. Not even the phrase I just typed. I’d rather
be moving bookcases around again. And that’s not going to happen any old time soon.
I’ll pencil in a date for winter in hell.
*
What will I learn
from the experience? Nothing. I’ll relearn
things. Every year goes under the eyeball, and every archived year is compressed
into a few hours of searching and weeding and flamethrowering.
People will resurface and fade. Places that changed,
hell, they’ll pop into view again. Objects I object to will remain objectionable.
Things I misplaced will reappear digitally, allowing me to treasure hunt them back
into existence.
And ideas? Those linger as titles on empty files
that I won’t remove.
*
There are loose ends.
And tied ends. My computer wallpaper is based on a file in a fixed location. If
I move the folder, the wallpaper peels off. There are several other examples of
things I dare not shift or consolidate. I mustn’t mistake loose ends – fixable –
with tied ends…tied. The obvious remedy is to leave tied ends tied, and, maybe this
is madness, also copy the tied ends to a more reasonable archived location.
How much duplication is out there, in the files?
Far too much. I know the duplicate archive looms, iceberg-like, in the depths of
the overall data ocean. Luckily, I hold a mad belief. The unwanted duplicate archive
could only be in the mere megabytes. Why, it would take but a moment to slog through
all that crap. A moment that, for technical reasons, we’ll call…a month of
Sundays.
*
Why consolidate? Consolidation
makes things easier to do all those hard things that make things easier. I believe
I haven’t created an artificial black hole that siphoned material off into its own
pocket universe. And I also believe that I must be sure of this.
It’s a glorious opporchancity to ensure that
there aren’t any slightly different multiple near-copies of files left lurking in
the archives. Oh, I know those bastards exist – and I’ve fallen foul of them before.
It doesn’t matter how tight a ship you run, you run across the stormy sea just the
same. And the sea’s the boss, not the ship.
Duplication of effort is inevitable. Now and
then, temporarily, for safety’s sake, it is desirable to have multiple copies floating
around. I’m not talking about a full backing up of an archive – that’s vital. You
handle projects with a load of data and you create a snapshot of how it is going.
A temporary duplicate, just in case. And there’s a glitch. So you were right to
create duplicates of duplicates.
But once that archive is laid to rest, backed
up and held secure, then let the digital dust settle. You are absolutely certain
you’ll never muck around with the information again. And so. Time for a digital
clearout. I’ve held off long enough.
Noted computer software engineer Cher holds to this view: if it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter.
If I haven’t used a file in five years, it
most likely doesn’t matter until one second after I delete the bastard. The
best form of archiving is publication. So why do I have multiple copies of
material I’ve set afloat on the Mighty Amazon? I turned my back on an acorn,
and now it’s the effing forest.
How long will it take to clean the old archive,
and what will be the creature’s final form? I’ll suspect I'll have the answer to
that one when I see the job through to the exceedingly bitter end.
Who knows. This might end up as a lot of fuss
about nothing. Upgrading to Windows 10 was a nightmare in preparation, and
a snooze in execution. As long as this process isn’t the opposite of that process,
I’ll survive. Also, as long as this process is a one-off, then…I’m fooling myself
into thinking that it is a one-off. These digital fixes are never aloft alone. They
fly in formation, thirteen-deep.
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