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.

1730

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.

1303

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…

1432

(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.

1502

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.)

1544

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…?