All data sorted...? Also: crazy step-by-step for setting up OMV.

 Saturday, 6th of Dec, 2025 - 1726

I think that maybe… all the data is sorted.

This is the most confident I've been that I have a definitive collection of directories containing all the data I've ever accumulated. 2 terabytes of stuff. Yikes.

Anyway, back to smashing my head against a wall, also known as configuring the Linux-by-another-name that is OpenMediaVault.

…but, to be fair, it hasn't been horrendous yet.

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Just in case it disappears, because the internet is fickle:
https://archive.ph/ev7l1

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…when I say “all the data is sorted”, obviously not all the data is sorted; there's still the messes that are Music and Comics, and the folder containing all my old work, pictures, etc. is a bit (lot) of a mess, but I'm fairly certain it's all there. I’ve got to the level of confidence that I'm being a bit gung ho with the data now, almost to the point that if it hasn't been swept up in my (not-very-fine-meshed) net whilst combing the piles of data, it wasn't meant to be.

I’d backed up a lot of stuff to a stack of loose 3.5” drives and had planned to copy the newly-sorted data over that old stuff, but I think I might keep it as-is, just in case things were lost, and, crucially, I ever actually noticed that something is missing.

Changing the subject back to OMV, here's a treat:

This is my version of those linked-to instructions for setting up shared directories. Again, I am struck by how very long-winded the process is. I do hope this system proves more reliable than the disappearing shared folders under Windows, i.e. I hope it's worth it. To lose the astonishing ease with which it was possible to share directories AND have it be unreliable would be most irritating.

But the general consensus online is that OMV is a fine option.

BIOS battery; Winamp to Wacup; taking lots of time to setup OMV

Decided to open up the PavNAS to replace the CMOS battery. It's such a pain in the arse compared to a lovely ThinkPad; ALL the back panel screws need removing, and then the crappy plastic back panel still needs spudging off anyway. Such a cheap PoS.

…but it works! Possibly.

The BIOS is awfully basic, so doesn't have the option to auto-power-on after a power cut; I've toggled some settings so it auto-turns-on at midnight everyday (might mod that to be something more sensible like five in the morning, to catch power cuts in the wee hours, though I don't know if this feature actually works yet).

Had a funny moment just now when I couldn't remotely access the harddrive I had mapped yesterday from Windows’s File Mangler, and when I logged into the system via a browser it said the drive was “Missing”. Uh oh.

…then I noticed the CD bay adaptor containing a HDD lying on the desk which I had not yet replaced after opening up the laptop. Derp.

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Completely unrelated aside: I've been using Winamp to play MP3s since 2000, when I first bought my first, own PC. There was a whole thing with Winamp (that I never learned about and don't have the bandwidth to care about) and some forkage which resulted in me using 5.666 for the last few years.

I'm not entirely sure what prompted the transition a few weeks ago, but I've stumbled upon Wacup as an alternative. It has some kind of lyrics plug-in, which seems to sometimes work, but the greatest improvement I've found so far is being able to use the spacebar for pausing. ZXCVB controls still work, but the spacebar is soooo much easier to hit to pause, and it's intuitive after so long using space to pause in e.g. youtube and VLC. I'm finding it particularly useful as I'm transitioning away from youtube towards listening to audiobooks instead.

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One side-effect of replacing the battery was the BIOS resetting to defaults, including turning secure boot back on, and turning off legacy boot. This then resulted in the message “The selected boot devices failed” when trying to boot.

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That whole thing of Windows not copying everything in a directory because of pErMisSiOnS has come back to bite me on the butt: I've found some stuff that isn’t in the supposedly “definitive” sorted back-up folder of everything…

It seems that TreeSize ignores such nonsense, so I need to use that when copying in the future.

In other news, setting up shares in OMV is quite time-consuming; the process is long-winded with many, many steps, and the disk initialisation (or whatever it does) takes an aaaaaage, especially for a 1.8TB drive, but it does seem to work. 

…or does it…? The web interface says “allocating group tables” and the tables tick up very slowly (it's going to take until at least tomorrow morning to finish for the 1.8TB drive) but the screen on the actual laptop has a loooooong list of entries saying “usb 3-2.1: device descriptor read/64, error -110”. Some googling suggests this might be a power issue…

But the table allocating whatever is still ticking up, so I'll let it do its thing.

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I've now had a chance to compare two versions of the Backup\BAckup\BACKUP\BACKUP TEMP\BACKUP TEST directory and have found that, indeed, a whole swathe of stuff is missing from the “definitive” version. When I have some time (i.e. when work & the real world isn't taking up my valuable time) I'll collate two versions of the folder and ensure I have everything backed up.

OpenMediaVault!!!1!

I’d like to write in here one day and not have to detail a weird thing happening. But that day is not today.

As I have greatly reduced the amount of space taken up by the DataHorde™, I need less space to store it, so I thought I'd slightly reduce the amount of storage connected to PavNAS. Its main storage is a 2TB 3.5” drive in a powered external enclosure, which is nearly enough for the 2.1TB taken up by the DataHorde™ (yeah, I know the actual size of the drive is only about 1.8TB, but it's still capable of holding the vast majority of it). There's also a 465GB drive in a CD bay adaptor, and two more drives (465GB and 931GB) connected via ‘naked’ USB caddies. My plan was to take out the 1TB drive for use in another portable caddy, and fit a mere 320GB drive instead. 

So, I swapped the hardware, and booted the PavNAS.

First problem was a time\date error. I vaguely remember this being an issue before; it seems the BIOS battery is dead, but I ignored because the system would always be on.

…Until I have to unplug it to move it or whatever, and then I need to put in the time & date again. Oopslol. Need to wedge a new 2032 in there at some point.

Next bit of fun: the 931GB drive has left behind a very persistent ghost. I've definitely unplugged it and replaced it with a 320GB drive, but File Mangler, Fdisk, AND Diskpart all report the 931GB drive as still being present.

Karabast to it, I thought, Windows is being a twonk, and I'm going to over-write it all anyway because…

Next, I proceeded to install OpenMediaVault (more on this later, don't worry; I won't skip this momentous movement) and during installation it asks where it wants installing to. This also reports the 1TB drive as still being connected. I figure we're still in the realms of this being an artefact of the Windows installation.

So I install OMV, and there are the usual Linux learning curve issues (compounded by there not being a GUI at all this time, thus I am UTTERLY reliant on googling for commands), but after some piddling about I am, astonishingly, actually able to log on to the new system in a browser on another computer!!

And guess what I find there…?

The 931GB drive is still showing up.

What the actual zark is going on…?

Anyway….

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenMediaVault/comments/g3q47o/how_to_keep_laptop_from_turning_off/

https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php?thread/33773-unable-to-prevent-laptop-suspend-shutdown-when-closing-the-lid/

I think that's stopped it turning off or sleeping when I shut the lid. Check: lid closed, and can still work on the system via web.

I tried plugging in the 298GB (“931GB”) harddrive again, and this time nothing at all showed up, which might be an improvement. Then I tried unplugging the USB cables (power from USB PSU, and power\data from USB hub) and replugging. Fdisk (thrilled to find that on Linux, though probs shouldn't be surprised) then reports a 298GB drive - success! 

It also appears on the drive list in the OMV browser interface on another machine. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Right, this entry has gone a bit zarz-backwards, but what's going on is that I'm attempting to use OpenMediaVault instead of Win11 on the PavNAS. This will mean yet one fewer Windows machine and make the PavNAS an actual NAS, rather than a Windows machine with a load of shared folders. True, it'll make it a one-trick-act, but it is definitely a good idea to learn this stuff, and get more Linux experience.

I'm following this guide:

https://www.xda-developers.com/building-a-nas-with-openmediavault/

…which is not flawless, and, as with many of these things, isn't exactly the same version as the one running in front of me, but I've muddled through.

Astonishingly, apart from the harddrive weirdness (something to do with it being connected via a USB hub?), it's gone really rather smoothly. I've only got one drive\share\folder online so far, but I've been able to access it using File Mangler on two Windows PCs, and copy files to and from it!

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…and managed to access it from a mobile phone! Working as well as Windows so far, so nothing lost yet. Seems to be using about 20W of power with lid closed and doing stuff.

A proper stretch goal would be to be able to access the files whilst not on the local network, and divest myself from reliance on a big tech company…

ACTUAL PROGRESS with sorting the data

…and get on with it I did. What a day! Everything is much more under control and I feel so much better about the DataHorde™.

I sat down and went through the several (many…) folders of unsorted stuff, dropping it over into categorised directories (Books, Films, Games, etc.) and, at the same time, discovering & eliminating replications. Overall, it clearer over 1TB of space by getting rid of replicated and unwanted stuff.

For the first time, nearly thirty years’ worth of my accumulated data is in one folder (well, there's a small amount still to sort, but less than 0.5% of the total).

There's still some sorting to do; I have previously mentioned that the Music and Comics directories are particularly lawless at the moment.

But it's all just so much more manageable without weird folders of unsorted crap all over the place. Now I can just get on with the business of backing-up the sorted stuff.

I began by starting to copy the sorted data (from the large external HDD I had done all the work on) onto the old Rock desktop (splitting the data across its three HDDs). Immediately, I made a mistake by deleting the (partially worked-upon) Unsorted directory from the external drive, rather than the completely unsorted version already on one of the internal drives. It's not the end of the world, as no data was lost, but it is annoying to have to redo work.

I must be more careful. Nothing was actually lost apart from a little time, but it could have been much worse…

Then a weird thing happened this evening, because of course it did. I gave a relative an external drive for them to back-up all their data on and then give back to me as an off-site back-up. (I have misplaced that original drive (it is in a “safe place”, hopefully) but thankfully made a few copies of its contents first.)

I thought to get that backed-up data onto a separate external drive (as well as it being multiply backed-up) so shuffled some 2.5” HDDs between some external caddies. The weird thing is that the drives behave differently, or are treated differently by Windows, depending on which caddy they're in.

Formatting the drive in one caddy (which happens to be the one from my first external HDD - Transcend Storejet) results in it “needs to be formatted before use” when plugged in via another caddy.

Some googling reveals that sometimes it just be like that. Which is ridiculous.

Tomorrow I'll try the same HDDs and caddies in Linux Mint to see if it's the same story there. Other than that, I guess I'll just have to leave one drive in the Transcend caddy, and that's where that lives.

Windows Explorer size reporting issues (still...) solved by switching to Treesize Free

 Monday, 1st of Dec, 2025 - 2210

Another surprise: T410 running Linux Mint; connect (2.5”) harddrive via eSATA; works & accessible straight away. At least something is functional.

I've moved the Rock old desktop setup with its ailing monitors out of LE’s side of the cellar; it was a bit of a pisstake using up some of their space.

Back to the issue of misreported folder sizes; it's reared its annoying head again. Some googling has revealed that this is a common Windows (especially 10, though that might be recency bias) problem, sometimes indeed to do with permissions.

I had a ridiculous situation where I went to copy a 299GB directory into 360GB’s worth of space, but only after completing most of the copying did the system inform me that I needed an additional 200-odd gib of space. 

It seems that copying folders solves the misreporting problem; you just have to ‘authorise’ the copying with admin permission once, and it works.

As an experiment, I copied the contents of the (allegedly) 299GB directory into a new folder on the same disk; as if by magic, the new folder’s size was 430GB. Silly Windows.

I had been using WinDirStat as a handy tool to quickly analyse & visualise directory sizes, but it misreports in exactly the same way as File Explorer (or File Mangler, as we used to call File Manager, many years ago).

The earlier googling suggested using Treesize Free instead, and it seems to be much more accurate. I'll use that in future, despite its constant advertising.

I just need to sit down for a day and get on with this silly project.

eSATA e nada

Oh zark, I'm an idiot.

A couple of days ago, before work got in the way, as part of the increasingly silly and uncontrollable copying-and-backing-up, I thought I'd have a go at using eSATA. It seems a bit archaic now, but it should be quite quick, and offers an external attachment that doesn't rely on the USB bus (bus) so should allow fast transfer between an external (USB-connected) drive and another external drive. I outfitted (infitted?) one of the old desktops (the Rock) with a eSATA card at some point, and have an eSATA to SATA cable (it also had a USB cable inline for power).

I took a 1TB drive (3.5”, if you want to already guess where this falls down) and plugged it in to the card and a USB port. Nothing. Tried another USB port, and still nothing.

I tried updating drivers, thinking it might not be available to the system since the last Win10 IoT install, but that didn't help. Assuming the eSATA card had died, I ditched the idea and thought next about trying the cable with one of the T410s, which have eSATA ports.

(Have you seen my error? I didn't until just now…)

A brainwave today made me realise that I'd been attempting to use a HDD that required a 12V supply, which neither the eSATA (I don't think) nor the USB port can supply. What a wally.

Let's try it again with a 2.5” drive and its 5V requirements.

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Still nothing. Quelle surprise. Other than the surprise at finding out that maybe I'm not an idiot.

The ridiculousness of how Windows reports directory sizes: lack of permission means size is ZERO.

Two ‘interesting’ (read: annoying) things have happened today, and I don't understand either of them.

The first is that I'm attempting to copy a reported 924 billion bytes of data onto a drive with a capacity of 993 billion bytes, which sounds as though it should work… but it doesn't. It claims that more space is needed. Curious.

The second is possibly related to the first: on the external drive from which I'm attempting to copy the data, lots of the folders won't let me in unless I grant myself permission first (which always seems like such a stupidly pointless step; there's no verification required beyond me clicking a box. If we're really a problem, it wouldn't let me do it at all, so why issue the non-challenging challenge…??).

The interesting thing about this second one is that the folders which I “don't currently have permission to access” report their size as 0 bytes until I give myself permission to access them.

And there's lots of these folders.

Experimenting: after giving myself access to a few, the reported size of the whole parent directory is now 932 billion bytes! So the stupid machine is reporting an artificially-low byte-count simply because it thinks the folders it “doesn't currently have permission to access” contain 0 bytes!

Then, for unknown reasons, these restrictions disappear when the data is copied to another location, and it turns out that the data is actually much more voluminous than reported.

What the zark am I supposed to do about that…?

I've tried changing the permissions so that the computer I'm logged into has full read\write access, but it doesn't seem to apply that to sub-directories, and there's no option to force that. After doing this step, there are still folders which I “don't currently have permission to access” and they're  still reporting their size as 0 bytes.

It seems I might have to click each folder individually and “click continue to permanently get access to this folder”.

Wot a load of old zark.

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It seems I can do this entirely using the keyboard, only using the down-arrow and enter keys. Still tedious, and seems like something I could outsource to Homer's stoopid bird.

I can't believe I'm living in the year 2025, in the time of ever-more powerful “AI” nonsense, and I'm doing this zarking stuff manually…

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(Some time, and a break for lunch later…)

I think I've gone through all the folders and sorted access.

…then I found out that archive files were behaving similarly, and they don't give up access so easily. I think I might be able to just copy them across and back and that might remove the permission nonsense…?

But anyway: just doing the folders has upped the data volume total to 1.056 trillion bytes, which is why it wouldn't fit on the 931 billion-byte hard-drive.

Right, so the archive files have copied across and I can indeed access them straightforwardly in their new home; now to copy them back (having moved the originals elsewhere temporarily) and see if the easy access holds up…

In terms of the issue of not having enough space to back-up this TEMP folder of things to sort, I think I'll start by just going through it and ruthlessly deleting a load of stuff I definitely don't want or I can check I have elsewhere already.

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Much deleting of duplicated data has been done, and the reported size of the directory has come down to a ‘mere’ 807 billion bytes, which should, even given more permission-shenanigans, fit on the 931 billion-byte hard-drive.

Blimey, that was 20% of that unsorted data, and it's just gone. How much other wasted space have I got lying around…? (My backing-up and copying strategy is hugely disorganised, so maybe don't answer that.)

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I'm starting a similar procedure on the other old desktop (Big Box) and it's going slowly so far. It may not be the latest machine, but it shouldn't be working as slowly as it is. Any major copying or deleting operation seems to flood its memory and even the mouse movements become jerky & broken.

And just when I was marvelling how much quicker it was to copy stuff onto a computer whose HDDs are connected via sata rather than usb (PavNAS)....

Moving data around, rather than tackling the real issue...

Slight change of plan, of course: rather than have a mere hard-drive as my off-site back-up, I'm going to use a whole computer…

The old Rock is fitted with three 960GB hard-drives which is just about enough storage to load on all my pointless data (there's also the OS SSD in there which provides a bit of breathing room for additional storage). It provides a bit of reässurance (if not redundancy…) in that if one of the drives in there fails, only a third of the data is lost, rather than all of the data were it all on one drive. There's possibly a logical thought there somewhere.

I'm in the process of copying over the data onto the old desktop. When it's done, I'll bag ‘n’ box the computer and transport it to an off-site loft. This process has been made much easier by the semi-permanent computer set-up I've put in the cellar: basically a couple of old Dell monitors and a LAN-over-power-cables adaptor (the monitors are failing (I think they're of the era where they still used fluorescent tubes for illumination) and the internet is slow, but it all works).

I have a second old desktop which I'll attempt to fill with a similar capacity of storage drives and then fill those with the same data.

Well, not quite: what I need to do is SORTING! One of the 960GB drives will be over half-filled with “to sort” which is back-ups & downloads that have yet to be placed in the appropriate directories. This is a job best-done using the 5TB storage drive: all the unsorted data and the sorting directories can be on there and I can just sort the data into the directories; doing this across separate drives would be much slower.

Needs doing though! I have a suspicion that there's some stuff that's in the unsorted directory that's also in the sorted folders, but I won't know until I actually go through and sort it.

It occurs to me that this is something of a waste of life. Perhaps I should be consuming & enjoying the data I've accumulated, rather than just endlessly shuffling it around.

It's a hobby I guess.

The backing-up goes off the rails...

The whole copying saga continues. I think I'm losing track of stuff, even with lists of directories made. What a folly.

Also: sorting out one of the remaining Win10 Pro machines: LE’s HP laptop. Win11 is installed and now just to get the programs & data on there. How exciting.

Not spending more money, or, not buying my way out of the problem. Also: a plan(ish) for backing-up.

The Great Backup & NAS Saga continues.

Main news: shares on PavNAS refuse to stay share or visible or something. Ugh. 

Backing stuff up all over the place and trying to rationalise the places in which my hoard of data is stored. It’s taking an age.

Curry’s (Dixons/PC World/whatever) have annoyed me twice this week, firstly when I was browsing and sorted my search by price only them to insert “sponsored” products into the search results so the low-to-high price order actually looks like:

10

10

11

15

TwO hUnDRed aNd FifTy pOuNds

20

25

Zark off, Currys; you’re not Amazon and never will be.

Then I found an external harddrive I wanted and the website said it was in stock in my local shop. Go in, it’s not on-shelf, and a ticket says “ask member of staff for this product”. Have you ever tried to get served in Curry’s??? Just like the hellhole where I work, they take in loads of cash and then pay the people on the ground in peanuts so, like me, they’re spending their days not giving a zark until they can clock out and zark off.

Anyway, it was actually a good result because then & there in the shop I decided not to spend another £45 on another external harddrive only a fortnight after buying the last one. Realising that buying a mere 1TB drive would be a folly, and a waste of money, Currys did me a favour and reminded me that I have a literal stack of old internal 3.5” HDDs in a box, as well as the means to power & connect them. They're mostly ‘only’ 500GB but that's quite a lot really.

I don't really have a back-up strategy going into this major sort-out (you'll be shocked to hear) but I am taking care (I think) to make sure I have two other copies before deleting anything.

I did briefly make the mistake of trying to copy from one externally-connected harddrive to another, both of which were connected to the same USB port, which is a folly (though not one costing £45). Now I'm spending inordinate hours on shuffling data around in order that copying only happens between an external and an internal drive.

It's important to remember the strategy, such that it is:

• Find & collate all the unsorted stuff so that it's in ONE place. (Time-consuming…)

• Get all that onto an internal drive (the old HP AIO has two 465GB drives internally; and PavNAS has a 920GB secondary drive, so hopefully the unsorted stuff is less than this terabyteish. WTF am I doing with my life if it's more than that…)

• Back it all up in its unsorted state. (Important!)

• Connect a 5TB drive externally.

• Go through everything in the unsorted pile and one-by-one move it into the sorting folders on the external drive (Very time-consuming…)

• Periodically (because this won't be done in one session), copy the sorted data BACK onto an internal drive so that it can be backed-up onto another external drive. Well, two drives: the other 5TB external, and also a series of the loose 500GB 3.5” drives.

• End up with two pretty-much identical 5GB drives with everything backed-up on them, AND all the sorted data (split up) copied over a series of loose drives.

• When this (first…) stage is done, get this (semi-)sorted data onto the two old big box computers, and back onto PavNAS’s drives.

• In the medium-term, I need to do more granular sorting within the sorted directories (e.g. Music & Comics are messy folders…)

With all that done, it's back to the long-term plan, which has remained the same since this log started: have an always-on NAS which I can access from any device in the house. I thought I was there with PavNAS, but it doesn't seem to work. Argh.

I'm even considering trying to make the NAS Linus-based… OpenMediaVault needs some thought too.

I'm almost unrelated news: I've just looked up and found that I first bought an external harddrive at the end of 2009; it cost £68.28 and was 500GB (an incredible capacity at the time - maybe it still would be if I weren't such a data-hoarder…) So data-storage has become cheaper over time, even if it's taken a little uptick in price lately.

A not-always-on NAS

The “always-on” NAS isn't on.

I opened up the laptop that is PavNAS, and the screen was blank with no real signs of life. Moving the mouse or tapping the power button did nothing so I held it down to turn it off and on again.

Then the location showed up remotely again. Huh.

I'll take it upstairs to update what's on its many drives and investigate the power issue.

Is it Windows 11…? Should I ‘downgrade’ it to Win10 IoT? Or even just bite the bullet EVEN MORE and have the NAS running Linux…?