File Hoarding

I am a chronic hoarder of files. Shit I downloaded years ago "I might need one day". I just hard deleted 51 gigs of shit I thought I might need...one day.

Are you like this?

yes.

yeah you can just go by the rule: If you do not know what this folder contains right now you will never know. So just delete it

One particular bane of mine is reference images and sound FX files. I have a pretty good memory for images I have downloaded as reference, and after locating in my brain what I need and then not finding it on my drive... it will not be a good day.

no i do not have this problem at all

visual file browers also help:

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//

  Quote

Ever wondered why your hard disk is full? Or what directory is taking up most of the space? When using conventional disk browsing tools, such as Windows Explorer, these questions may be hard to answer. With SequoiaView however, they can be answered almost immediately. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate those large files that you haven't accessed in one year, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on your drive. The screenshots below give a first impression of the original cushion treemaps

cool o00o. I never knew such a thing existed.

I will download it in case I need it one day.

  On 4/13/2011 at 2:47 PM, rumbo said:

cool o00o. I never knew such a thing existed.

I will download it in case I need it one day.

you can assign a certain colour to a certain file extension so all mp3s are red for example. really awesome to get a quick overview

wow that's awesome.

here's my meat locker drive:

red is video, green is music, purple is isos.

  On 4/13/2011 at 3:06 PM, disparaissant said:

wow that's awesome.

here's my meat locker drive:

red is video, green is music, purple is isos.

hehe my external drive looks similar.

I also have lots of unfinished downloaded files and torrents in temp directories which I would never be aware of without these tools. Or applications download updates automatically and keep the setup files of all versions in some totally unknown temp folder.

man i love that program! i was just looking through my other drive and was like "oh whats this?" and found a copy of NI komplete that i forgot about, haha.

aw god i am such a digital packrat.

I always delete something after I download it, unless I'm lazy in which case I delete it a bit later. I'm never worried about what I delete especially regarding things I download. I treat the Internet as my back up hard drive, if I need something later I'll just download it again.

  On 4/13/2011 at 4:16 PM, ZiggomaticV17 said:

I always delete something after I download it, unless I'm lazy in which case I delete it a bit later. I'm never worried about what I delete especially regarding things I download. I treat the Internet as my back up hard drive, if I need something later I'll just download it again.

yeah totally true

What's the deal with all this long deleted stuff in this folder?

  On 4/13/2011 at 5:22 PM, futuregirlfriend said:

What's the deal with all this long deleted stuff in this folder?

 

looks like a temp file just delete it

  On 4/13/2011 at 5:22 PM, futuregirlfriend said:

What's the deal with all this long deleted stuff in this folder?

 

Judging by the title, your PC just wants to Be Prepared.

i only keep stuff that was hard to acquire, why would you need something like boc lps for example if you're not actively listening to them, it'll take mere minutes to get them with proper internets. it might seem a bit risky but i don't remember having problem re-acquiring stuff i needed.

turns out my d:\ recycle bin was/is fucked. things weren't properly deleted. just freed a buttload of space with this http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/131294-recycle-bin-corrupted-cannot-delete-file-folder.html

weird. Gnome has a similar one that isn't so bubbly(maybe a barchart with directory structure type of thing), I forget what it is called but i like it.

Anyways, I usually delete all installers and .zips after I have used them, I prefer to download latest version off the net if I need to install something. I keep movies and music and documents forever for sure though.

yeah i'm terrible about this. i should delete stuff more

  On 4/13/2011 at 2:38 PM, disparaissant said:

no i do not have this problem at all

 

  Reveal hidden contents

oh god i need help

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

anyone else see "C:" and "D:" as smiley's? i can't unsee it now

  On 4/13/2011 at 8:42 PM, Bubba69 said:

weird. Gnome has a similar one that isn't so bubbly(maybe a barchart with directory structure type of thing), I forget what it is called but i like it.

Baobab

here's some alternatives to sequoiaview, from a blog post i did ages back

treesize/windirstat/scanner/overdisk - all of these analyze hard disk usage. the first two use trees (treesize being lighter on info than windirstat), the second two use radial graphs (scanner being lighter on info than overdisk).

i have a visualization tool somewhere -- some visual basic piece of shit, not flashy like those ones. it's good for the low-hanging fruit, but it doesn't solve the problem, which is it takes a lot of grunt work to organize this shit, especially if you're a packrat.

video is the least of my worries. large and obvious. it's the images of my hard drive from 1992 that are a problem organizationally...

  On 4/13/2011 at 9:11 PM, Calx Sherbet said:

  On 4/13/2011 at 2:38 PM, disparaissant said:

no i do not have this problem at all

 

  Reveal hidden contents

oh god i need help

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

 

anyone else see "C:" and "D:" as smiley's? i can't unsee it now

ALWAAAAYS!

my external used to be X: just to round it out (kissyface!) but it kept reverting to G: whenever i disconnected it so i gave up.