I find myself in a painful situation which is made painful by the need to spend money to correct it or live with inconvenience, and the situation goes as follows. I’ve got a huge amount of hard disk space available to me over a variety of disks, and a variety of media spread over these disks. Specifically (all internal) Sata: 1x2TB, 1x1TB, 4x500GB and IDE: 3x 500GB, 1x 300GB. I also have a SATA external NAS device which runs a linux kernal and uses a non standard file-system. I have also a separate external SATA enclosure, access to my Dad’s external IDE enclosure, and an IDE raid card. My desktop computer had previously had all the 500GB SATA disks and all the IDE disks installed in it, which left the 2TB and 1TB disks in the NAS and SATa enclosure. Happy days you might think, until you find out that the bios on my desktop overheats causing the desktop to freeze and in a way that never automatically restarts. I’m trying to consider alternatives to purchasing a new motherboard ram cpu combo (and quite possibly a new power supply).
Adding to the issues are approximately 800GB of assorted music, of which there are (I’m assuming) many duplicates, backups of CDs that I’ve ripped and inadvertently re-ripped, mp3s I took to China which were copies of files themselves and have now returned, wma’s that I’ve converted and re-converted by the way of setting up itunes many times for whatever reason and podcasts that I’ve downloaded through the automatic downloader on my PSP or NAS as well as through iTunes or on my iPhone. An organisational pain in and of itself, and from quite legitimate sources, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I have complete collections of Mozart and other classical artists purchased from Amazon, I keep every podcast I download, and I’ve been downloading them for what is years now, so this amount is not exactly an unreasonable amount considering duplication, and I have in the past subscribed to emusic, and have repeatedly downloaded music which I thought I’d lost etc.
The music itself poses a problem, because for iTunes to function properly the relative paths of each and every mp3 needs to remain consistent, and unlike Google’s Picasa iTunes does not live update according to what it can see, and this poses sync problems for my iPod and iPhone. My laptop hard disk is only 500GB (which is pretty big by laptop standards) and can’t fit it all on. Adding mp3s to iTunes from a samba share is slow and prone to outage either though taking my laptop away or poor wireless signal in the house so not a good solution. I discount syncing my iPod to a desktop because that means I can’t update podcasts and applications on the device if I’ve gone on holiday or away from my home. So my only conclusion is the 1TB sata disk in the external enclosure.
Maybe 600GB of DVD backups (Yes I do own lots of DVDS as well) which doesn’t need to be network accessible, but would like to have available to be converted to DivX avis and MP4s so that I can just ditch the original files. 2x400GB Photos and Home Videos which is duplicated on a different disk for the sake of backup. 200GB of applications (steam content takes up a large proportion of this), which I’d also like to be duplicated on whatever desktop I have.
In this sort of situation moving files around becomes tedious because the volumes are just so large. The photos should be available on the NAS, along with the DVD rips, a backup of my applications/drivers and any documents. The photos can be backed up onto a 500GB IDE disk in the external enclosure. Therefore the music and the photos can be accessible on the move and the other IDE’s and SATAs become redundant and spare as necessary. I can use the automatic downloader on the NAS to download podcasts, not requiring me to leave my laptop on all the time, and move them onto the external disk when I wish to sync my iPhone. Fantastic, I do believe I have a complete solution.
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