So. Many. Duplicates.

You may or may not have noticed that my usual fevered pitch of posting has dropped off this weekend. There's a reason.

I needed to step away from the madness that is our world right now for a while and concentrate on something that wasn't related—at least not directly—to the downfall of Western Civilization.

As I've written before, I'm more than just a bit of a digital hoarder. That was brought into succinct focus last week when my laptop's drive dropped under 10% available, adding even more anxiety to my already frazzled psyche. I have several different archive drives available, but they're all nearing capacity as well and the last thing I wanted to do was add yet another one to the mix. So I bit the bullet and bought a 2TB Sandisk external SSD. (I have a 512GB  version that I use for my nightly Carbon Copy Clone that's performed flawlessly for over a year, so I felt comfortable committing to an all SSD archive strategy.) I figure since my archives are currently a bit shy of one terabyte this should hold me for a while since those archives stretch back decades.

Everything was going smoothly until in my haste, I accidentally deleted a bunch of old pictures that existed on only one of those archive drives. To be honest, they weren't that important—it was only about 12 years of old (1995-2007) "art prints." I knew the quality and resolution of the earlier stuff especially wasn't worth crying over, but it was still annoying that for someone who should know better, I'd lost it all through my own stupidity.

Turns out the stuff wasn't lost, but it was going to be a pain to restore it. I'd burned all those images onto a DVD optical disk in early 2008. Unfortunately, the images weren't as meticulously curated as I've been doing for the last fourteen years, all types of pictures existing in simple yearly folders.

Now any sane person would've just copied everything over in the yearly folders, backed them up on the new SSD and called it a day. But I've never claimed to be sane.

No, I was determined to put everything back the way it was before I'd wiped out those files from the archive; the way I'd done many years ago that matched the folder structure I'd been actively using since 2008. It was painful  then, and I knew it was going to be painful now.

I won't bore you with any further details, but suffice to say that two days into this project, I'm still not to the point where I can actually offload my "art print" collection in its entirely to the new drive. Everything else that had been on disparate drives (documents, non-pornographic pictures, software, etc.) was moved, but not the menz—because in my anal retentiveness, in addition to sorting the images into subfolders and renaming to match my existing nomenclature, I'm also weeding out duplicates, and OMG, are there ever duplicates!

I've sorted about half so far and have weeded out duplicates as I've run across them, but I can't do a thorough weeding until everything is in the proper folders and I can run PhotoSweeper on the master folder to find duplicates across all the yearly folders.

I know it's crazy, but it is providing a nice respite from the awful swirling about in the world, and it's kind of nice seeing some of the old…um…faces…that I haven't seen in a decade or more.