

Ask HN: How do you handle archiving of old files? - ferret-o

I&#x27;ve been keeping archives of all of my files since around 2006. That includes college notes, many many e-mail exchanges, invoices, and other stuff I&#x27;ll almost certainly never look at again except for nostalgic reasons. I currently have all this at my fingertips on my primary computer and on a backup to a network share in my home.<p>How do you handle archiving of old files? Do you delete old stuff? I&#x27;m currently going through a mental battle between deleting all my old &quot;junk&quot; for the sake of clearing out the mental baggage associated with it versus accepting the possibility that I&#x27;ll delete something and later wish I hadn&#x27;t. Currently looking at a list of folders labeled 2006 through 2013 and am torn between hitting the delete key or not. What do you do?
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informatimago
My oldest file is 1975-06-25.

Don't bother. Just buy new disks. Disk capacities double every so often, while
being cheaper and more energetically efficient.

Therefore there's no point in spending time sorting out your files, deleting,
archiving them. Just copy them to the bigger new disks, and leave them there.

Really. At various times I've made archives (gzip'ed tarballs). They amount to
an insignificant size compared to the multiple terabytes of storage currently
available on my workstation (200 KB(!) + 8 MB(!) + 16 GB).

It was really not worth the time of sorting them out and archiving them.

Similarly, for backups, I guess it's clear nowadays, that just having various
hard disks of the same size and synch'ing them is the most time efficient and
safest way to backup. I've spend so much time backuping on various classes of
devices (magnetic tapes, optical disks, CDR), they all were time consumming
and most of the time, failed to restore correctly at 100%. Hard disk storage
is the best, fastest and cheapest.

Now of course, nowadays we're switching to SSD, so there's a little price bump
compared to magnetic hard disks, and there are still some worrying about the
perenity of data on SSD. But the technology improves, and if you can fit in
the capacities (for your budget), this can be used as well as hard disks.

Just wait for "Her". Then sorting and archiving will be done by your personnal
AI in a fraction of second. :-)

