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.
