💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~mathpunk › 10-19_CAPSULE_CONTENTS › 11_JOURNAL › 11.2023.05.23_PIC… captured on 2023-07-22 at 17:24:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm undertaking a massive spring cleaning of my entire 1TB hard drive, since I'm going to upgrade to a 4TB SSD soon - and instead of cloning the drive, I plan on starting afresh, going entirely without Windows for the first time. Thus I've decided to go through my entire drive (which is almost totally full) and decide what to keep and what to toss.
I'm only about 3 days into it, and it's clearly going to be at least a month-long project. My computer is currently very disorganized, and my end goal is to have a filesystem I can roughly sketch out from memory. I'm simplifying, throwing away literal hundreds of memes I saved once five years ago, so it might seem odd that I'm upgrading to something with four times the space. The reason for that - I just want to have a lot of space to mess around with different operating systems. Oh, that, and modern games are becoming unreasonably big, and I do still want to play with my friends sometimes.
I've learned some important things about myself through this process of mass deletion. For one, I hate being disorganized, but I let it happen because I can't settle on the "perfect" system. That's why I can't just nuke everything and start over - there are pictures of my dog, who's passed away, hidden in random folders and random places. So I want to check every file, manually, to decide what I do and don't want to take with me to the new system.
For two, and this is the big one, I take and/or save pictures for two different reasons that don't entirely overlap. The first is just to share them - pictures of food I'm proud of, memes I found funny, stuff like that. The second reason is to keep them - sure, I shared all the pictures of my neighbor's dog, but the reason I took them was for myself to look at in the future. Whenever I need to feel better, I look at pictures like that. In other words, I take some pictures to share in the moment, and I take others to share in the future.
This has really helped me reduce the amount of pictures that take up space on my phone or my hard drive. I still take pictures of food - but I send them to my friends, then delete them. I still save memes I think are funny - but I just send them to my friends, and then delete them. I only keep the pictures I know I want to keep. I've instituted this as a rule going forward - hopefully, I'll never have to do a month of spring cleaning ever again.
I also deleted a ton of my ex's stuff, which was hard. Lots of pictures of her, games that she installed that I never cared to play, stuff like that. I haven't deleted all of it, yet. I don't know if I can. But I think I want to. Wish me luck.