It was the best of archives,
it was the worst of archives…
Make copies of your work. I’ve made copies
of copies of files. And accidental copies of those. Where does the madness end?
Great files have little files and more back-ups to
byte ’em.
And little files have cloned folders and so ad infinitum.
And the great archives themselves, in turn, have branching
files to go on,
While these again have duplicates of duplicates, and
so on.
(This has always been with me, but conjures
up memories of a blog post going back nine years. Damned archiving.)
To business. I stumbled into a folder and
found a file that shouldn’t have been there. This is the hazard of dragging files
and dropping them.
You will occasionally drag the right prisoner to the wrong
cell. Moving the file to the right digital jail, incarcerating that piece of
information for eternity, was but the work of a moment. I fixed it.
However, this set me to thinking. How many
more files are in the wrong places? Is this number unknowable, unfathomable,
and non-fixable? I dealt with a particular category of file. Okay. How many
folders do I need to check, here? And how many sub-folders?
Let’s swirl the stick in the stew and see
what pops up unexpectedly…
One folder with two sub-folders. Enthusiastically,
I head off to the sub-folder. Loads of folders in the sub-folder. These are
sub-sub-folders, now. And there are eight of those. But they all have
sub-folders of their own, as I’d expect…
And yet, even allowing for a fair degree of
organisation…there are additional folders
that sneaked in under cover of the electronic mist. On top of that, there are
loose files scattered all over the shop. Well. Damn. My work proceeds into the realm
of individual files, down around the Ninth Level o’ Hell…
The result? I created more folders,
temporary ones, on the desktop. Five of those, to contain the plague. There’s
an entire folder that was utterly misplaced, buried in the archive, so that headed
over to the desktop as well.
Action. I shunted stray files from my
archive into the five temporary folders. How many strays, in this vast ocean?
The offenders were 28, 58, 1, 1, and 3. Not many misplaced files, after all. The
truly wayward folder had five files in it. Very low numbers.
The
first two on the list are higher as they have whole categories to work off. And
the rest are the result of isolated dragging-and-dropping mistakes. You’d
expect, even in the best of organised offices, to have stray cats wandering the
digital streets. So far, so normal…
But another
folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
What’s this, lingering in the archive? Not
even a hundred stray files. All is well in shaded country lanes. And yet,
here’s this wood that I can’t see for the trees. What the fuck is THE FALLEN ARCHIVE, and why the fuck
would I create such a creature?
This fallen archive is four years old, and
sits in a folder that’s a back-up. Says so. Okay. But looking inside this mess,
I see it’s a duplicate of many file folders with different categories and
flavours of ice cream with all the toppings and…
What.
The.
Actual.
Fucketty-fuck.
My best guess? This monstrosity is, itself,
a temporary thing. I’d set it down as a place-holder while backing up loads of
things. Added layer of security, just for a short while. The problem is that…I
set it down in an obscure place. The wrong sub-folder. So I did all my
archiving, and checked to make sure I’d swept the floor clean…
But the duplicate fallen archive wasn’t on
the floor, or even in that building. I’ve done periodic reviews to make sure I’d
eliminated redundant duplicated efforts. Oh, I have no problem duplicating
efforts – that’s the point of backing things up.
Over time, though, you create an extra layer
of duplication here, there. I’ve reviewed the files, scanned the landscape, and
studied the folders like Gandalf on a fucking mission to answer riddles in the
dark. Sure, I’ve found mini-archives that escaped my notice before…
You dig deep. But yesterday upon the stair,
I found an archive that wasn’t there when I conducted my deep dig. Yesterday, I
accidentally journeyed to the centre of the archive. The fallen archive. Cast
out of digital heaven, its wings scorched and torn off by the descent into
electronic hell…
What fresh level of fuckwittery is this?
We’ll find the villain responsible and…oh. Right. Nothing to see here. Jog the
fuck on. Except. There was a lot to see here. The fallen archive had two
subfolders, damn it.
Two horns on which to gore my tired flailing
corpse. I was undead by this point. The red glare behind each eye, source of my
necromantic power, came into the world fuelled by what was left of the last
coffee I consumed before the arcane ritual took hold.
I’m glaring at the folders now. In one,
3,572 files. And in the other, a mere 675 files. All loose. No
sub-sub-sub-rub-a-dub-dub-flub-flub-glub-glub-sub-woofer-sub-tweeter-submarine-sub-folders.
Over 4,000 duplicated files, risen as though Lost Atlantis resurfaced for a bit
of a lark.
Well that’s just fucking great. Warp nine,
Mr Frodo.
Nine
GIG of space. I’m saddened that there aren’t any sub-folders in there. Fucking
should be. Would make my life a hell of a lot easier. I can see whole fields of
files grouped by similar theme. But there are no fences, separating those
fields.
I hope this is the largest unholy duplication
on the machine. It feels like the lumpiest accumulation of over-duplicated data
in the one forgotten space. How do I manage this mound of multiplicity? Delete?
Oh, that’s too easy. This information has to be checked against the real
archive before I delete a thing.
And the real archive is also the back-up
archive, stored on the external hard drive. It’s over on the external drive
that I must do all my serious checking. Do these files exist on the spare machine?
Yes. Why do they exist as a fallen archive? Guessing, now.
I’m sure there is a reason. My main hope is
that I never blogged openly about setting up a fallen archive, explaining that
reason in public. Awkward. Let’s fire up the external device, and see what we
can see…
Atomic
batteries to power. Turbines to speed…
Unsurprisingly, when backing up the main
archive…I backed up the fallen archive as well, right there on External Avenue.
How to proceed from here? I’ll work my way through the fallen archive on the
computer, checking against the main archive to see that every file in the
fallen archive is definitely a duplicate based on information stored in all the
right wrong places. Those fallen files can go.
At the end, I believe the fallen archive
will be empty as I murder pointless duplicates. Absurd notion, I know. If it
isn’t empty, there’s more digging to do. And if I mess up, hey, the fallen
archive is already there on the external drive anyway. I’m still safe. If I
make a colossal mistake here, there’s stuff stored on the cloud as well.
Time to dig deep into the digital dust. I’ll
start with the smaller of the two photocopied archives. Fewer files to deal with.
Maybe more difficult files to corral into the field. Putting fencing up as I
type…
Step one. Disconnect the external drive. No
need to confuse the issue.
Next. Go to the fallen archive, part two.
Step three. Sigh.
Next.
*
Of course there was a NEXT. Dim realisation shone upon my
fevered brow, and I quickly switched over to the first part of the fallen
archive. There, I secured large sections of duplicated material, and I deleted
half the overall problem inside a minute. Around four GIG of stuff. I realised
about half of what I’d done in setting the mess up in the first fucking place.
Doing so well.
But another
another folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
Think of it as a desperate movie-pitch. Lord of the Rings 2: Revenge of the Sith.
What if, right, hear me out, no, hear me out. This is it. Sauron had a twin
brother: Zauron. And it’s Zauron who
was the big eye guy at the end of the trilogy.
So this is his ring, which is almost identical
to Sauron’s. That means…Zauron was destroyed. But Sauron was unaffected by the
loss of the twin ring. Zauron’s ring grants the power of immunity to flame.
Including lava. Though, ironically, it couldn’t save itself. Never mind that
bit. It’s borrowed from STAR WARS.
Movie opens with Darth Vader climbing out of
the volcano. Gollum, who fell into the volcano with Zauron’s ring – Mjollnir –
has returned as Darth Vader. He jumps out, right, he jumps out of the lava a
microsecond before Zauron’s ring dissolves in the lava.
The ring writhes and transforms as it dies,
turning into a hand and giving Gollum one final thumb of approval, before
melting forever. Now, scarred beyond belief and wearing a primitive
steam-powered life-support suit crafted by the Dwarf Alberich, Darth Gollum
Vader must seek out new life, and new civilisations, and boldly Gollum where no
Hobbit ever Hobbited before.
He must find Sauron’s ring before Sauron
does. Meanwhile, Sauron has been using his growing magical powers to transport
his new body to Japan, where he receives a Mecha-upgrade and turns into a
fifty-foot-tall Killer Death Robot with rocket launcher arms and an
armour-plated greenhouse for a head.
Darth Gollum Vader/The Batman then faces off
against Sauron the Greenhouse Mecha-God in a best-of-three wrestling
spectacular in the depths of Bank underground station in London. This is a
railway station so deep that even Balrogs fear to tread the haunted ruins.
I fear readers may suspect that I have moved
away somewhat from the initial point.
The point was…while wrestling with the
fallen archive I noticed, out of the corner of my screen, another folder. CLEANUP. A temporary folder. Forgotten.
Dusty. Forlorn. Musty. Forfuck’ssake. Rusty.
And this fucker held sixteen GIG of shit,
making the fallen archive look sleek and aerodynamically elegant by comparison.
I believed, with the fever of a thousand stars, that I’d nailed this over-duplication
down long ago.
Also…as standard, one folder was empty. An
easy fix, that gremlin.
And a slightly more…annoying…fix? On the way
to the end of this blog post, I stumbled over another another another folder. Duplicate Archive. At least I made that
easy for myself. This blob ran away with two GIG of data. I blitzed it with a
howitzer.
Well fucketty-fuck-fuck-fuck, how wrong
could I be? Just slightly wrong about everything. That’s far worse than being
very wrong about one thing. Unless I’m wrong about that. Back to the data mines
I go, 28 folders of doom ahead of me – sitting crooked, like tombstones, in a
lost graveyard. File this mess under the hashtag #NOHASHTAG.
No comments:
Post a Comment