Archival, organization, backup...

I spent the entire day organizing, backing up, and archiving my digital files, mostly from ASMS(A). I have completed both the laptop hard drive and my CD collection. I put everything on the hard drive under C:\Christopher\ and sorted my CDs into a music case (all black) and an archival case (black with yellow corner), and backed up CDs to hard drive that had no other copies. I copied the entire Christopher folder from the laptop hard drive to Le Fantasma, a 20GB hard drive I made portable after removing it from Dad's old computer. Now that everything is organized and backed up to a portable hard drive, tomorrow I will reformat the laptop, and set up a dual-boot with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux, for the best of both worlds.

The major problem I had today was separating the significant files from the insignificant ones. At ASMS(A), I saved in the same folders my in-progress and final product files. Since a good number of temporary files lead up to each final one, this made it hard to determine which files were worthy of archival and which weren't. I tried a bit to separate them, but I mostly just left them together, making more work for the person (me and/or my eventual posterity) who will eventually browse through these files. In the future, I will use two methods to make archival easier and the archives files more useful:

1. Rather than making new copies of files when I move from computer to computer, and having to manually reconcile the various file versions, I will store all works-in-progress in one always-available location (either network, thumb drive, or portable harddrive, but not all three), and spread about as few files as possible.
2. Once I have completed any given work-in-progress, I will save a final copy in both the working folder and in a highly organized "completed works" folder. The "completed works" folder will be backed up and archived more regularly than the working folders.
   

Digital clutter is not as visible as physical clutter, but it is clutter nonetheless, and reduces the findability of files and usability of storage systems. If I put a slight effort into keeping my files organized as I go, I will hopefully never again have to spend an entire day preparing them for backup and archival.

Fhew... now I can sleep.

Chris