FILE MANAGEMENT IN SPRING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Spring sprang.
   I look at my archive on a regular basis. The archive doesn’t wait for the masked ball to begin. Spring signals a change in the weather. It is an alarm clock that serves as a reminder that I can check my archive whenever I please. Speaking of which…
   Every single time I decide to tale a long hard look at my archive…
   I think I’ve dealt with duplication of effort. The two items go together so well. I’ll look at my archive. Duplication? I dealt with that already. Right? Wrong. No, no. I am right. Think about the components in this recipe for disaster.
   Copies of copies of files. Weeded. Duplicate folders. Thinned. Clones of directories. Murdered in the dark. Excess excessery. Excised.
   But…
   No.
   Here I am again again, taking the world’s biggest flamethrower to it all. Just like a heist merchant going after one last job, this is for the last time. And. Just for once. This time it’s real/personal/revenge. But this time, things are different, as I go in armed with a flamethrower in each hand. How do I tackle the eternal problem?
   I stare at duplicate files, not realising that they are duplicate files.
   In terms of paper files and folders, I’m staring at someone else’s conspiracy. I glare at boxes of time-wrinkled folders with sheets of paper in each folder and more sheets of paper lying loose on the floor.
   The loose leaves are, in the end, duplicates of the sheets tidied away inside folders within boxes packed in stacks across five rooms in two buildings. Red threads connect the dots.
   That would be the paper equivalent. And the world is a happier place in that equivalent setting. Meanwhile, back on a real planet near you…
   The digital reality is nowhere near as tidy as that mess. I go looking for my own published works. How hard is that? In each case, I head to a folder. The tales are all corralled there. Except that they aren’t. Not even remotely.
   In two cases, I am forced to go looking in an area of the archive that is through a very creaky door and along an unloved hallway daubed in flaking green paint. The kind of paint you see in run-down hospitals. Folders are along that hall, somewhere. Not true. Folders are down that hall. Everywhere. At each junction. Spilling from every cupboard.
   I went checking for the stuff I truly needed to check. And I discovered the ruins of all the files that I squeezed dry to create the stuff I needed. My recipe is nailed loosely to a wall. And empty packets of ingredients lie scattered down three corridors. Those are all files and folders, too.
   Somewhere in there, I’ve pinned the latest files, the important files, to a board made from cork. And I’ve taken that vital bulletin device and slid it into the back of a cupboard somewhere in this or another universe.
   Investigation is virtually endless. But, yes, it comes to an end. I was updating all the vital files. That’s what led to this blog post. Electronic books containing hyperlinks leading out of each book and onto the interwebs…those books must be maintained.
   Oh, they must.
   If you have to update your fiction book, the thing you are most likely to update is the dreaded hyperlink to someone/something/somewhere else. For want of a file the update was lost. And for want of the update the hyperlink was stale. For want of the hyperlink the reader was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
   Or something like that.
   Non-fiction works definitely require far more regular tending and weeding, especially of links, than do their fictional counterparts. I admit that the moon turns blue before I go into the tedious business of checking books for hyperlink issues. But these books are fiction. Factual works need regular watering, permits, X-Rays, complex tests, and planning permission applied for long after the fact.
   Managing hyperlinks. Let me count the ways.
   I found, for example, that one creator’s two separate links had somehow merged into links that went to the same internet page. This was clearly not the case when I plugged the artist’s work initially. I pruned his links with the snippety-snip of the digital shears, and all was well once more. Well. Until next the moon turns blue.
   This is not on the same level as refreshing the tree of liberty from time to time.
   The upshot, though, was noticing – really noticing – even more duplication of effort that I thought I’d rid myself of the last time I thought I’d rid myself of the time before that…
   And so on, to the horizon and beyond.
   What was the problem area I’d missed? Oh, just a whole slice of circles within spirals and wheels within wheels. Endless filing is endless. At least, with paper, you know you’ve reached the point at which the door into the room won’t open/close – delete as applicable.
   The danger with digital files, even the wordy ones, is that you’ll never fill the storage device to capacity. Text files confirm that talk is cheap – at least in terms of the amount of space taken up. Photos and videos. Those are horses of a wildly different colour.
   I will now change some file folder names to protect the indifferent.
   My problem lay in the CHOCOLATE folder. That sat in a sub-folder marked AMBROSIA. Also in the AMBROSIA folder was a sub-folder marked EARTH. Digging deep into CHOCOLATE, I discovered a sub-folder marked MISCELLANEOUS PASTA. In that sub-folder, I found a sub-folder labelled AMBROSIA 1 and another called AMBROSIA 2.
   All of these folders held files. The chocolate files. Ambrosia files. Earth files. Digging into the AMBROSIA 1 folder, I discovered the chocolate files all over again. So the chocolate files were in the CHOCOLATE folder where you’d expect them to be, but an accidental copy of those files sat in a sub-folder within a pocket universe.
   This was just the start of the beginning of the opening of the first bit of the tip of a very large iceberg. I repeated the crazy paving pattern at the front of my digital house as well as at the back. Copies of things should sit in other folders, not in sub-folders within the main folder.
   CHOCOLATE folder can have a CHOCOLATE folder copy sitting next to it in the main ARCHIVE folder. But CHOCOLATE folder shouldn’t have a copy of CHOCOLATE folder deeper inside the CHOCOLATE folder with a further copy of CHOCOLATE folder even deeper inside the copy of a copy.
   High levels of fractal energy there. Frac that bullshit.
   This is what I’d missed the last time, somehow. And all the times before, I guess. I had book files listed in folders by year. Each year, the old book folders stayed untouched. I copied them over to the new folder for the new year, and added to the new folder over the course of that year.
   Things are more complex than that over time, and quirks develop in any system. I decided I only needed all of the book files once. So I checked each yearly entry for quirks. For files that only appeared in one year and not the year before or after.
   Just double-triple-checking. The usual.
   Gradually, I reduced the book folder’s level of duplication to near-zero. Individual projects all have their own blank file I can write in. Very small handy level of duplication.
   The entire folder is duplicated in cloud storage and in at least two portable hard drives. But on the computer itself, there is one folder to rule them all. It is most precious to me.
   Taking a detour into checking hyperlinks of published books, I realised that more than mere quirks still existed in the system. Then I discovered this nesting Russian doll problem. Folder 1 contains files and also folder 2. Folder 2 contains different files, but also a folder you’ll find in folder 1. What do you do about this?
   Fire up the flamethrower.
   Open folders in different windows. Compare files. Check for names. Then for size of each file. Date of last alteration. If there is doubt, open the duplicate files together and check every page on both files. Then make a decision about what you are keeping and what you are deleting. You will be deleting.
   Later, this will have a knock-on effect on how much data you are storing on the cloud and on any physical storage devices. If I slim down the duplication, I want that slimmed down on the emergency copies elsewhere.
   As far as I know, I’ve never lost data. Never shredded a document by mistake. Haven’t deleted a file or a folder that I was meant to keep. I may be a bit shaky on the generation and storage of duplicate files as time flows by...
   But I am on far sturdier ground when it comes to quintuple-triple-double-triple checking the deleting or shredding of material.
   People have lost data about me. But that is another story.