Crankybunny

Between a rock and a hard place I sit.  Both my work computer and my home computer, after only one year and eight months of use, are full to capicity and unstable due to all of the little programs that I have put on and taken off in my quest for great software.  The solution?  A lot of hard work, a disk imaging/back-up software purchase and a complete wipe of the system.

When Red Sonja, my beloved first laptop (a Dell) was beginning to fail I dumped the data files onto an emergency external hard drive without using the attached (awful) Maxtor One Touch back up program.  Then when the laptop formerly-known-as-(I forgot what it was called) started to have problems I began trying to back up my data in the manner of a very confused, unknowledgable luddite.

So now I currently have a faltering laptop named FooKitty and a Maxtor external drive with both restore points and random archive folders on it.

The goal here is to make reinstallations of the operating system and drivers CLEAN and easy (meaning without out all the bloatware that gets put in when you use the Vaio Recovery Wizard) and to have a mostly logical data storage and backup system in place.  God, I can’t believe it took me so long to do this.  I was so organized a few years back and had logically split programs from data both at work and at home but somehow in the past few years with the bike trip and the not so challenging work I slipped into an apathetic daze.

The data clean up before recovery attempt are:

1. Review standalone data dumps from previous computers and incarnations of computers
2. Review all restore points and create a stand alone dataset
3. Combine results from 1) and 2) so that there is one copy of data on the Maxtor external hard drive
4. Run a single data only backup of current data on computer
5. Combine data from Maxtor and data from Vaio to get a final copy of all data
6. Copy that dataset onto brand spanking new LaCie drive so that there is a back up copy of data.

File organization - this is something that I have been picking at for years.  At my old job I was sort of ridiculed for being the folder structure nazi but I have to say that having a specific place to store projects isn’t a bad thing and sure as hell helped me keep track of production.

Some problems do occur when you are reading basemap data from one place and storing files in anothter and when the basemap data changes links are broken everywhere and chaos ensues.  I let my organization go at home, jumping on the “go with the flow” mentality of these times of copious storage space.  While tagging and word recognizition functionality works for the internet and application launchers (like Launchy!) work for starting programs - random searching for crap on a computer filled with 100s of thousands of files isn’t cutting it - there needs to be some heirarchy.  My computer can’t read my mind…yet.

But no longer is the just save it mentality goint to work - if you don’t know where it is, you can’t back it up and you will lose it.  This all became very apparent when my camera was stolen (from my luggage at JFK by JetBlue luggage handlers & yes I was stupid to pack it).  I wasn’t sure if I had downloaded photos from my vacation in Barcelona earlier in the year.  Precious memories to be jogged by an image in my future role as an oldster - lost (or so I thought).  It was then that I realized that I really needed to get my shit together.

File folder structure:

C: drive - XP crap only

D: drive - data and “Program Files”

• Remapped “My Documents” folder
• _basemaps (GIS basemap data)
• _downloads (program files split into “testing” and “using”; also the registration info)
• _finances (quicken files & spreadsheets)
• _gtd (gtd program files - Thinking Rock & UltraRecall)
• _images (non-my camera images)
• _misc_documents (not writing stuff more like pdfs, e-receipts, misc stuff)
• _misc_folders (I have a million misc folders usually Project Gutenburg books and stuff that doesn’t have a place to live)
• _originals_gps (original gps downloads from Garmin - to be permanently archived)
• _originals_photos (original photos - to be permanently archived)
• _misc_spread (non categorized spreadsheets)
• _music (all that cd, itunes and amazon mp3 music)
• _SASG (project files for travel stuff - edited gps/photo files)
• _web_crankybunny (crankybunny backups, css, settings, data, etc)
• _web_northarrow(northarrowguides backups, css, settings, data, etc)
• _web_SASG(steady-as-she-goes backups, css, settings, data, etc)
• _words (writing)
• _work (projects from work)
• Program Files (the install place for all that crap I run)
• SANDBOX (working area for misc projects, programming exercises, etc)

It seems like a lot but I think that being able to find stuff is a big problem.  This way even if you have misfiled you can search a much smaller set of folders to try to find what you are looking for.

The next problem is how to create that Recovery Disk without the bloatware.  Next post…