I've finally lost my patience with the file arrangement on my computer. Had a HD crash three years ago and the rebuild is effing chaos! The HD is 1tb and has over 1000 Doc files in a half dozen random nested directories. I don't even know what lots of the files are.
This is like totally my own fault and if I had a husband, he would spank me and then make me fix it my own self.
The main concern is that while I move all these files around the disk might get so fragmented that it loses things.
I've been irresponsibly limping along by just putting working files on my desk top and letting word put things where I can find them.
Woe is me.
Gwen
Now, get to work !
Comments
You need several large thumb drves for backups
It might prevent the "Oopsie" factor while you reorganize.
Thank you.
I have some 8 gig,and a couple others. I think all my Doc files will fit on one drive. Yes, I will do that.
Thank you
Gwen
These days...
Free cloud storage isn't a bad idea as another (please note) method of backing up important files. The bonus is that they're accessible from any computer with an internet connection.
~And so it goes...
Just be sure to...
...have 3 or 4 copies so if Google will decide to kill Drive (as it done with several of its services) you will not lose anything.
Luckily, there are quite a few cloud services out there...
Have several, so that if any disappear you have backups of your backups. One huge advantage of cloud services in general is that they handle redundant backups for you. For a hundred bucks a year, or so, you can get some significant portion of a Terabyte, which ought to handle most authors quite handily, unless your story resembles that of a famous bicyclist and natural history buff and has been going on for many years... I myself have half a dozen paid off-site backup sites, but then I'm very fond of dozens, part of a system of maths that goes all the way back to the ancient Babylonians and before, most currently used by almost every culture for astronomical, calendrical, and some few other trigonometic purposes.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Several things.
First - backup. Even if the backup is jumbled as all get out, create one.
Second - enable preview, if your OS supports it.
Third - create a folder on your desktop called 'Sorted'. (and one called ToSort if you wanted to dump everything in one spot as part of the backup).
Fourth - stop a few minutes, and figure out what you want your folder hierarchy to be, and create the basics in that Sorted folder.
Fifth - Do a first, broad pass, and sort all documents into types, into that Sorted folder.
Sixth - Do a second, narrow pass, and create subfolders under the Sorted folders, and decide keep, go into more detail, or throw away.
Seventh - Make another backup.
Eighth - try to keep up with it, and back up regularly :)
BTW - Six will take the longest, and might take days, or even weeks, especially if you're sorting your pictures or music.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Music is usually easy - most
Music is usually easy - most of file types have tags. So if it was organised before - just import into anything that can sort by tags. But if the tags were a mess.... Well... no hopes here.
Same goes for photos from digital cameras - they usually have at least date in their EXIF block.
PS. People are divided into two categories: one who do backups, and another, that don't do backups yet.
As Tucker said...
...in several of the chapters of Tuck saga: "if you can't provide recent backup - price doubles."
:-)
A Possible way of handling large ammount of files
I have 1. a good HD in the puter and then 2. A separate DH of 1TB. I keep the active (which are still under production ) on the puter HD and once a story is ended it is copied to the separate HD. On both HDs the material is sorted in a) authors maps, Story names map and then original files (untouched) map, and finally as a Total file if that is around 500 pages or less. This allows me to add other things that can be of interests at each level, such as pictures. word-lists, explanations from author or readers that might be interesting.
SO:
Stories
--Author
---Story title
----Original files
----Total ( chapters stripped of material that starts every single file or other repetitive things)
----Pictures
----Other relevant material ( e.g. other authors that have written in the same sphere such as all authors that
have written in the SPA univers )
So far this has been sufficient for me. It was easy to help one of our readers to get some order of the Book 5 of Maddy Bell's series about Drew.
Hope this will help You.
Ginnie
GinnieG
As Benjamin Franklin once said...
Three removes equals one fire. Offsite backups provide the same sort of security that fire insurance does, allowing one to recover one's work after almost any disaster short of asteroids come crashing down from the sky.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
As a matter of record...
I've been working in the computer field since well before "personal computers" were invented. In fact, I built one of the first personal computers (using a Z-80 chipset and assorted parts) when making computers for one's own use was totally weird, somewhat less freakish than eating live snakes and toads, but not by much.
In the long years since, I've experienced at least a dozen hard disk crashes, possibly more. A merciful veil of forgetfullness has obscured at least a few of the worst.
The bottom line, as they say, is "Back your stuff up!" or you might as well write on toilet paper rolls and store your archives in the loo.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
You might try Calibre
I use Calibre to manage my eBook library on my computer. It creates the folders and organizes my eBook files easily. I have only used it for books books I bought from Amazon and some books in the epub format, but it can handle other eBook formats as well, and I have read that it can also accept the doc file format as well.
After loading your files into Calibre, you would have to go through them to make sure the title and author are set for each book, and it creates the folders, and if you add more information it creates a searchable database. It can do this automatically with epub and Amazon books. But i haven't tried with doc files. You may have to manually correct the title or author, but once the books are loaded into Calibre, I think it make book organization simpler.
Here is the link to the web site
Calibre eBook manager
--Brandon Young
Calibre
yup it can even work with compressed files, like zip, and rar archives.
[ I just checked with the calibre version installed by default on my linux box. ]
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
Calibre...
If you've gone to the trouble to make a Kindle book, you can publish it as a free book on Amazon, who will cheerfully archive it forever,, as long as you describe the age limits and general content accurately. If you ever decide ro make money off of it, it's easy to change the price to pretty much whatever suits you, as long as it's not available for less money from any "competing site." In other words, Amazon wants the opportunity to advertise to your customers, even if you seel the book for nothing. Seems fair enough, since any Kindle book (or digital music or videos) you buy from Amazon is likewise archived forever, assuming that their policies don't change, and I doubt very seriously that they would, since it's one of the big selling points of their digital content.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Thanks To All Of You
I greatly appreciate your kind advice and helpfulness. The only files I actually care about are Doc files. The Pictures, Videos and Music are not very high on my list.
I've got parts of about a dozen books strewn all over the place and it has been an impediment to my writing. So, perhaps it is best that I stop writing for a while and concentrate on cleaning the house.
Writing after action reports and instructional material is second nature to me, but writing fictional, fantasy, romance, action stories requires that I "find my voice". It is not easy for me, and my first stories were put down while I was under the influence of pain and psych meds. I have read the stories of retired police and soldiers who have done this. PTSD only wins if we let it, and no I won't be speaking further about that.
Much peace to all you lovely souls.
Gwen
Well, for right now.
The easiest thing to do. Until you have time to sort out and do a proper backup with blu-ray discs, is by a secondary harddrive for you computer. At least a 1TB SATA drive. Then, copy and paste. If you tried 1 TB transfer to thumb drives, you might be busy all day. Hard drive to hard drive. I have done this before. This will only take a few hours.
Also, if you have Windows 7 or higher. Go to: Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings
Select "hard drive". Set it to 3000 minutes. This is defaulted to ten minutes. Meaning this sitting will turn off the hard drive, off and on, as you use it. From personal experience, this will kill a hard drive over time. And when I started losing hard drive, I had to dig through the settings to find this.
Good luck, Gwen.
A variation ...
... on Paul's advice.
If you have a USB port on your computer, build a USB backup drive. A 2.5" WD 500GB SATA drive will cost about $45 from places like Frys Electronics (1TB is about $80), another $10 for a Sabrent 2.5" SATA II to USB 2.0 enclosure (comes with a USB data cable) and you have everything you need to backup your files to contiguous files on the new drive.
Why not just buy one of the canned USB backup drives? They have a dual weakness - the USB interface is built into the drive logic. If it fails, you pretty much lose access to the disk, even though your data is untouched. Plus, you can't plug the drive a normal SATA port, if need be. Moreover, I've got about five of these in use and, in the last 8 years, I've never had a Sabrent USB interface fail.
Got Windows 7 or later? You still have some powerful "DOS" tools available in the Command Prompt window, that will allow for unattended backup of selected portions of any directory tree.
E.g. [xcopy] with the /d, /e, /v, /i, /h, /r, /k, and /y switches will allow recursive (drills all the way down the selected path) copying of files. And it only copies files that are new or changed from what you've already put on the target drive. Give it a source disk\dir and destination disk\dir and go have a cuppa. This backs up a 200GB directory tree in about 45 minutes (the first time; less on subsequent backups.)
I even have a batch file [xcbackup.bat] just so I don't have to remember all the switches. (I hope this displays on this venue without interpretation.)
The syntax is "xcbackup [source_dsk\dir] [destination_dsk\dir]" .
The source can be as simple as "." (the current directory) .
Rem xcbackup.bat
@echo off
if "%1"=="" goto nosrc
if "%2"=="" goto nodst
xcopy %1 %2 /d /e /v /i /h /r /k /y
goto fine
:nosrc
echo Copy what? No source.
echo usage: xcbackup [source_dsk\dir] [destination_dsk\dir]
echo "." is an acceptable source
goto fine
:nodst
echo No destination
echo usage: xcbackup [source_dsk\dir] [destination_dsk\dir]
echo "." is an acceptable source
:fine
Save the above to a batch file [.bat] in a folder in your system path. Or do what I do, make a "\Utl" folder and add it to the default path. I keep all my handy little tools in that folder/directory.
Hope This Helps,
Deni
1tb Solid State Drive
Thank you.
I remembered that I have a 1tb solid state USB drive and just using Windows Explorer open on two screens, donor and recipient, started working on the project last night. I am surprised to find at least 9 levels of nested directories, that might have happened when the technician reclaimed lost data on a crashed HD and perhaps also when the Microsoft Store had my computer for a week giving it a free tune up. Not implying anything negative about Microsoft here. Of great confusion to me is that there are up to 6 versions of the same file strewn about in the various directories.
So, when I finish copying the files I want to the USB drive, there may be much less data than I think is there.
In the mid 90s I was very familiar with the various copy, move and delete instructions, and I had thought that since then all that went away. I am happy to hear that it has not.
The saga continues ... :)
Gwen
Hmmm...
This is so totally a familiar tale that I could scream. I've lost, at various times, computer privileges, iPad use, iPhone use and generally my own self esteem (self induced). We have 16T worth of storage and I have TWO, 2, II, too, flash drives of 32 G's each and I can't find anything!!! I have pictures shattered about in document files, bill files and everywhere but in picture files. My work documents are on one stick so they're safe but nothing else is!!! At least I'm not alone. My bad... :)
Ms. Placed...
Kelly