…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.
