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Sunday 1 September 2019

ARCHIVE UPDATE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.


Completely reorganising the digital archive was easier and harder than I thought it would be…which is pretty much how I thought things would go. It’s been easier reorganising the physical archive this past month. How is that going? I set the last bookcase in place.
   No, really, that’s it. I am done, this time. My bookcases are now leaping ahead of the game…I have excess storage for a time. How much time? A length of time equal to a piece of string. No more than that. Might be considerably less than that.
   It looks as though I’ll have excess digital storage for a long time, too. I knew one of the big problems would be stuff I couldn’t move. One of the other big problems is stumbling on utterly empty folders. They don’t need to be there. Gradually, very gradually, I sift through the shifting sands while perched on the hump of a rabid camel sliding down an iceberg into the jaws of hell.
   On a Sunday.
   When everything is shut and the buses run on a whim.
   In the heat of August on an October day in March.
   Yes, it’s a bit of a mix.
   What can I move around?
   Everything, so far.
   I’ve yet to encounter that dreaded mirage of the sands, the file that I just can’t move at all. These files exist. Files that are in use cannot be shifted, obviously. There are times when the computer tells you that you can’t move a file as it is in use…though, CLEARLY, the file in question isn’t being used at all, hasn’t been used in a dog’s age, and will, almost certainly, never be opened again.
   The solution is to rip the plug out at the socket and try again when the temper is cooler. Temperature. I may be mispronouncing my wurdz.

*

With the passage of time, how fares the job? I entered the grimmer stages of archiving. There were files I simply couldn’t move, for fear of disturbing internal links. I disturbed those links and moved the fucking files. Then I dealt with the hard part – fixing the links back up.
   Done and dusty. Very dusty.
   The rest of the problem won’t go away. Duplicate files. Good gravy, the duplicate files. If I ran this archive the way a nuclear power station is run, I’d have enough duplicate safety systems in reserve to build another dozen or so nuclear reactors out of the spares.
   Dig deep.
   They said.
   It’ll be easy.
   They said.
   Then I found dig deep references duplicated out to a depth of ten files, with a hint of ten more lurking behind yet another subterranean archive of an archive of an archive. I must impress upon you the nature of the tight ship I ran. If I’d run the Titanic as tightly as I ran my digital archive, the fucking iceberg would’ve been the one that sank.
   And yet, even running the tightest of ships, I am reminded that you can photocopy a digital archive in a very short time. And in a very long time. You know all about the very short time of copying an archive deliberately over the course of a few hours, girder by girder.
   But you don’t feel the grass growing under your feet, year to year, as accidental duplicates pile up. Long story short, duplicated, I had to stop archiving. The danger is that I delete every duplicate in some of the dustier areas of the archive.
   It’s one thing to take a fucking flamethrower to whole swathes of files, burning the fields to the roots and beyond. No harm done – I have the original crop saved for use at the drop of a file. But the killing of an essential file. And all its clones. In some massive flaming fucked-up way. It’s hard to take that shit back.
   ESSENTIAL essential files are duplicated in different locations. If an asteroid hits the town, losing data will be the least of my problems. Think of all the travel I’d be forced to endure, just to reach half-decent second-rate shops again.
    Yes, my difficulty lies in not losing data. Over the centuries I’ve been blessed with that curse. I’ve not lost so much essential data that I now have far too much duplicated essential data. And seeing the extent of it by shifting the archive from one end of the wedge to another is, frankly, shocking.
   Going from…
   YEAR X: TOPIC ONE, TOPIC TWO…
...to…
   TOPIC ONE: YEAR, YEAR, YEAR…TOPIC TWO: YEAR, YEAR, YEAR…
   Well. Fuck.

*

There’s no cure for this. It had to be done, and must be finished. Even just dipping in and starting this, I found everything arranged much more easily, and far more to my liking. Basic file usage feels so much better. I suspect that, as I shift files to the new system in chunks, shifting files will grow harder…
   The log-jam is coming. I’ll be down to the last few (thousand-odd) files and I’ll realise I’m caught in a puzzle of a riddle of a mystery of Scooby-Doo proportions. And, as I am the only suspect, I’ll rip this rubber mask off to reveal that I am Scooby. Scooby rips the mask off to reveal she is Velma. Jinkies.
   What’s the upshot? Well, it’s September. I am a few faded leaves and frosty mornings from year’s end and putting the 2019 archive to bed. It’s no longer the 2019 archive by year, though. Now it’s eighteen archives by topic, with twelve 2019 folders distributed across those topics.
   That’s right.
   Nothing is simple or straightforward when it comes to simple and straightforward archiving.
   I have one 2020 file set up already and it is only September. What do you mean Christmas decorations are on sale in the shops? It’s not even fucking Hallowe’en yet. Damn it. Upshot? I’m hunting wabbits, and I must be vewy vewy quiet.
   There’s a fifty-fifty chance that the annual archiving requirements somehow strangely clash with the overall change to the archive. Nothing’s been lost in the shuffle yet, as far as I know. The advantage here lies in this archive being easier to use. Technically, I should find lost stuff more easily as the new archival pillars go up.
   But, gasp, shock, horror, I had to take a break from it. The digital archiving ran through the long grass with another bout of physical archiving. I took a break from one to tackle the other. That wasn’t enough. When the alarm bells go off and you realise you never hooked the alarm bells up in the first place, you know it is time to shut that monstrous machine down.
   If you can.

*

No, I’m not keeping an accurate account of the number of duplicate files I roasted away into the digital sky. Loads. Too many. Yes, I check the duplicates to see if they are EXACT duplicates or part of the usual digital clusterfuck that forms within file folders over time.
   I’m staggered by it. Hashtag stunned. And I haven’t even addressed the raging shit-show that is this blog’s own archive. Somewhere along the line, I began writing the blog posts in Blogger itself. With each blog’s publication, the entry made its way to me via an e-mail notification reproducing the topic in full.
   This automatically generated a duplicate archive with no direct file copy on my computer itself. With no rhyme, no reason, to the writing of blog posts, I’d find myself writing directly in the blog or else in a file on my computer for transfer to the blog.
   I have more holes and patches in my archive than I care to face. Doesn’t matter. There’s the e-mail archive. Yes, I should fill in the holes and create a complete blog archive. I’m all archived out right now. There are woods and there are trees. I can’t see those for the giant whale burbling past my submarine window. And that’s a bit tricky to deal with, given that I am typing from the top of the Empire State Building.

*

Time for a moral.
   Better, perhaps, to quote Shakespeare…than to come up with a moral myself. Shakespeare wrote that. It’s in my archive. Next to twenty-umpty copies of the same file in four different (yet occultly-related) folders. I’ve had it with archiving. Even though I know I must return to the planet after being catapulted out of an absurd cannon, hell, that doesn’t make the journey feel any better.
   My over-archived file and folder collection prevented the loss of data. A few times, the archive steered me wrong. I recovered. With the new arrangement, I feel the archive will rarely send me off in the wrong direction. I am willing to accept the slight chance of falling off a cliff in the dark over the old method of occasionally stumbling into caves full of hungry bears.
   Right now, I could do with a coffee. Staring at the empty cup to my side, I see that I have just destroyed a coffee. So? I could still do with a coffee. An eyeball over the archive tells me I’ve created 2,695 files containing the word coffee. Not even a full one per cent of the files on this machine. Guess I drink more of it than write about it. That’s as the state of coffee should be. The state of the archive I’ll leave until I’ve had considerably more coffee.

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