In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2) by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, May 24, 2026 16:47
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VIEWED: 264003
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Saturday, May 23, 2026 6:23 PM

Uggggghhhhh.....

Man am I getting burnt out on file maintenance here...

It wouldn't be so bad if Windows wasn't ass at handling files over a network for anything more intensive than streaming. What a slow, glitchy shitshow it is. I just really don't want to remove the large drive from its home. I don't really want to touch that damn thing at all for any reason if at all possible. It won't be as valuable once everything is organized and all the most important stuff is backed up, but right now moving that thing could end up in disaster.

I'm doing well though, despite the hoops.

2.99TB free on the 5TB streaming drive.
1.84TB free on the 5TB work drive. (With over 750GB on-deck to delete once verification is made offsite)
2.25TB free on the 15TB drive.

I was actually making more progress than that on the 15TB drive, but I decided since I now had plenty of free space there it was time to start making my official backups on it. Before then, I had gotten it down to nearly 3TB free. At least 4TB of it is my official backups already, so I'm really only looking at about 8TB worth of stuff to organize and purge.

I think because of the downtime, I'm going to start taking out my two 2TB drives that had out of date backups and see what I'm working with on those. Chances are that everything on both of them can now be deleted, but I do want to make absolutely sure of that before I do it.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 6:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

What's with the drive that you have to be so careful about moving it? Is it pulling a lot of errors?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 6:56 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The couple that you work for sounds clueless. Hope she doesn't have you running up and down the stairs.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

She is clueless.

Here's another example of stupid things they have said.

She put on some classical music from Spotify or something like that. She asked me who I thought the composer was after listening I said, "Mozart." She had to look it up and she said, "You're right. You do know a lot of stuff."

I of course was totally stunned when she said it. Don't know why. Guess I wasn't expecting it. They just blow my mind sometimes.

I was running up and down the basement stairs. Almost tripped once and when I got to the top had to ask her to take one thing from me before I dropped it. She did it though. I usually bring things up one at a time but I thought since they were small but nope. Oh well.

They are also redoing the kitchen again some. The husband decided that they needed some more cabinets in the kitchen. Fine. But not that stupid white on a plain wood wall. Ugh! I'm not even sure that will work. They are also going to install a dishwasher which I haven't decided if that is a good idea or not.

Mind they are having people staying with them. They are hooked up with this mennonite group.

Still haven't made up my mind on that.

She sounds incredibly condescending. Maybe bc you don't converse with her, she doesn't realize how much you know.
But from what she sounds like, I'd probably have a hard time making more than polite conversation with her.

Was there was some sort of family connection between yours and theirs? You mentioned that you were there when you were little and corrected their boy on something.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 8:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What's with the drive that you have to be so careful about moving it? Is it pulling a lot of errors?

No. No errors. Although I did make it get close to overheating about a week ago, but it seems like it's fine and it's just the crap Windows network that is the bottleneck here. Any time I've tried to read stuff directly off the drive it works and it's very fast. Opening things from across the network is spotty though. They all eventually load, but no matter what I'm doing everything will randomly sieze up until Windows fixes whatever was bothering it while doing this work. Like it literally freezes up everything on my remote computer that has anything to do currently with the file system on my local or the remote drive until it's done. Other programs like Firefox playing YouTube videos aren't effected when this happens.

My concern is that it's 15TB and it's a 3.5" old school HDD with loads of platters and moving parts. It's the only drive I still own outside of a computer case that needs its own separate power supply. All my other externals are 2.5" drives that are powered by the USB port.

Not joking when I say I never want to move it from its current resting place. I treat that drive like it's one of the most fragile things I own.

The problem, physically, is that this PC with the large drive attached is part of my collection of tech that's on my TV stand under the TV. It's not a computer that has really ever been for "computing", although it does get plenty of use for other things after I got it all set up. But it really wasn't designed with using Windows in mind, even though I thankfully set up a Windows partition on it so I COULD use it for that if necessary.

But the TV isn't very big and is pretty low, and there's no good way to sit there and work on it unless I want to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor for hours, which isn't something I'm really keen on doing.

I think that going through the other two 2TB drives was the right move at the moment.

I've managed to get the first of them down to only about 500GB already.

The rest on that drive is a collection of untouched stuff I had backed up that I was concerned I may have deleted too quickly from the 15TB drive, so I'm going to just directly copy all that over for now and compare it to what is there now. A lot of it will be duplicates that can just be deleted, but it's got to be sorted through.

Not sure what to expect from the final 2TB drive. Hopefully that can all just be deleted without thinking about it.

Although...

There is one more thing that I'm a little concerned that I may have deleted too quickly that I'm guessing is also backed up there, so maybe another 500GB or so from the second 2TB backup drive might actually be copied over and sorted through as well.

...

It's really a funny thing... I document everything, but I didn't bother documenting my efforts so far at purging unnecessary data as I've been going. I'd LOVE to think that I haven't made a mistake so far, but when I see something is missing and I can't recall why I would have removed it when I did, I start second-guessing myself.

It shouldn't surprise me though. Now that we're adding another 4TB to the mix, we're talking 34+ TB of storage that was close to full before I did anything with it.

If this was just movies or tv shows or something, that wouldn't be a big deal, but we're talking files in the millions in total.

I know a lot will have been deleted by the time I do it, but when I have some downtime and I know it won't be slowing down other stuff, I should do a properties check on that drive and see just how many files are there right now. I'm sure it's a crazy amount. Easily over a million files still. I'm just wondering if we break 2 Million, by how many.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 10:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Hmmmm...

Didn't find what I was looking for on that last drive either.

Not really worried about it. It is objectively something that was old and not necessary anymore. I mentioned I had that old tech that I still could make use of and make things to give away. They should probably all be up-to-date enough to be usable as is, even if they weren't fully optimized. And I don't even know how much of that stuff even works anymore anyhow. I know a few of them were broke for sure, and I'd thought about trying to diagnose them and possibly cannibalize parts from one to make at least some of them work if a good deal of them are broken.

I dunno. I can't really bring myself to care too much about it now. Nostalgia is the only thing that would make me worry about it. It certainly wouldn't be logical for me to care about it anymore.

Good news is that the other spare drive was 5TB and not only 2TB like the first one. That's huge...

If I can narrow down the stuff that I need to be backed up to only 5TB on that 15TB drive, I'll have a 5TB and a 2TB drive to play with. I can probably have all my stuff backed up the way I'd like, make that 2TB drive my "Work Drive" and be able to do something really cool with that 5TB drive.

Gamechanger there, without needing to drop another $100-$125 like I thought I'd be doing soon.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 10:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Today was my day for cutting and trimming.

Pruned the roses, again. I'm trying to remove the downward/ forward growing canes over time, so I can do some gardening in front of them. It wasn't really hot, but I was sweating like crazy and wound up hypovolemic and exhausted.

Washed the dog and trimmed her nails.

Trimmed hubby's hair and beard.

Trimmed and cut a bunch of beef chuck for beef- vegetable soup.

I delegated dear daughter to peel and slice some carrots and and a potato. I have some boxed broth, leftover marinara, and celery and green beans for the soup once the meat is cooked. But right now I'm flopped on the sofa recouping.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 10:47 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So most of your drives are SSD, SIX? Somehow I kept picturing HDDs all stacked up somewhere.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 11:21 PM

BRENDA

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The couple that you work for sounds clueless. Hope she doesn't have you running up and down the stairs.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

She is clueless.

Here's another example of stupid things they have said.

She put on some classical music from Spotify or something like that. She asked me who I thought the composer was after listening I said, "Mozart." She had to look it up and she said, "You're right. You do know a lot of stuff."

I of course was totally stunned when she said it. Don't know why. Guess I wasn't expecting it. They just blow my mind sometimes.

I was running up and down the basement stairs. Almost tripped once and when I got to the top had to ask her to take one thing from me before I dropped it. She did it though. I usually bring things up one at a time but I thought since they were small but nope. Oh well.

They are also redoing the kitchen again some. The husband decided that they needed some more cabinets in the kitchen. Fine. But not that stupid white on a plain wood wall. Ugh! I'm not even sure that will work. They are also going to install a dishwasher which I haven't decided if that is a good idea or not.

Mind they are having people staying with them. They are hooked up with this mennonite group.

Still haven't made up my mind on that.
She sounds incredibly condescending. Maybe bc you don't converse with her, she doesn't realize how much you know.
But from what she sounds like, I'd probably have a hard time making more than polite conversation with her.

Was there was some sort of family connection between yours and theirs? You mentioned that you were there when you were little and corrected their boy on something.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

She is and sometimes her husband isn't far behind. It is hard to make conversation with them at times. And I do mean them. There are times when I don't want to talk to them about any subject because I think on a subconscious level I know that somewhere along the line religion will come into it. And by now they should know how I feel on that subject.

My mum was friends with the lady who used to own the house and my boss's husband was a friend of her son's. He, my boss's husband came up to Canada as a draft dodger. He stayed with them. I would have been around 2 or so when I first met both of them. I know it sounds complicated but its not really. You know how it goes. Friends of friends and children's friends type thing.

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 11:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So most of your drives are SSD, SIX? Somehow I kept picturing HDDs all stacked up somewhere.

No... Actually, you're not wrong.

Most of my drives inside of computers are HDDs. (And because I did keep those 10 160GB drives for possible future use, some of them technically are sitting in a stack now :laugh).

Except for a few 500GB or below laptop or old desktop drives that I put in cheap plastic enclosures that are SSD, the other 2.5" externals are all HDDs too. But I don't feel nearly as worried moving them around from place to place because all you need to do is eject them, then move them to another computer by just putting the USB data/power cable into the other computer.

None of my drives inside of the computers are big though. All ranging from maybe 250GB to 1TB or maybe there's a 2TB in there somewhere. Once these old beasts start dying, I'm going to remedy that. When they get replaced with newer computers, all that data can be put on faster, smaller drives.

They're all relatively quiet... That 15TB 3.5" drive is an oldschool beast though. It's LOUD, especially when writing to it. That's not a bug. It's a feature. It behaves exactly as an 80GB HDD did 20 years ago, but it's rocking 15TB.

Like I said, it's the only drive of that physical size that isn't inside of a computer, and it comes with an electrical plug you need to put in the wall or a power strip for additional power to make it run. Moving that is a production, and even after I spent that time wrapping up all the cables nicely, I don't feel like messing with it.

Finding out that one backup drive was 5TB though... that's the highlight of the week outside of finishing that vanity. I'm in the process of cloning my 500GB drive that I used for my project to the 5TB. After that, I'm going to expand the partition from 512GB to the full size of that 5TB drive and I should be able to back up the entirity of my project with it, but the entire 5TB drive will now be a working prototype of the entire project build on its own as well. Before, I had been using the 500GB drive as the base, and pointing it to a lot of stuff on that 15TB drive that I haven't yet backed up anywhere else.

There is a possiblity that I'll still choose to use a 500GB SSD drive as my primary use for this thing like I always have been... I'll have to see if using a 5TB HDD effects the performance at all. I think the only possible negative impact would be the initial boot up time, but this is all Linux based and is much better about that than Windows boots go. I really think my bottleneck here when I have any performance issues for a very small percentage of things is my crappy old computers and the drive speed probably doesn't matter since I don't see a point in time where after the system is loaded anything being used wouldn't fit into the active memory.

But if it turns out that loading everything from the HDD instead of the SSD is a problem, that's fine. I'll still have everything backed up again and it will be another completely usable backup instead of just another 5TB drive of files that I tuck away and don't look at for anther 7 to 10 years.

I'm really hoping everything works on the single 5TB drive without any performance issues though. If that's the case, that will severely curb the usage of the 15TB drive over a long period of time and probably add years to its life as a solid backup that I don't need to access very often.

I've decided I'm still going to use the 5TB "work drive" as my work drive after all, but it will also be used for backing up anything that I would ever actively be working on, and that 2tb drive should be enough to backup other things that are of lesser importance or would not likely need to be accessed very much.

This is going to work out great.

And if the HDD works out performance-wise, I'll even now end up with a 2nd extra 500GB SSD drive to play around with. That along with the 256GB SSD I already got is pretty cool.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 12:12 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
There is a possiblity that I'll still choose to use a 500GB SSD drive as my primary use for this thing like I always have been... I'll have to see if using a 5TB HDD effects the performance at all. I think the only possible negative impact would be the initial boot up time, but this is all Linux based and is much better about that than Windows boots go. I really think my bottleneck here when I have any performance issues for a very small percentage of things is my crappy old computers and the drive speed probably doesn't matter since I don't see a point in time where after the system is loaded anything being used wouldn't fit into the active memory.

But if it turns out that loading everything from the HDD instead of the SSD is a problem, that's fine. I'll still have everything backed up again and it will be another completely usable backup instead of just another 5TB drive of files that I tuck away and don't look at for anther 7 to 10 years.

I'm really hoping everything works on the single 5TB drive without any performance issues though. If that's the case, that will severely curb the usage of the 15TB drive over a long period of time and probably add years to its life as a solid backup that I don't need to access very often.

Although... come to think of it, I could just have both the 15TB and the 5TB drives attached all the time along with the 500GB SSD, and I could just launch with the SSD and point it to the 5TB for everything it needs instead of the 15TB. That way, the only time the 15TB drive ever needs to be accessed is for rare things, like if I were to get back into this project one day and I want to access things that aren't in the project. Or if my streaming drive died and I wanted to copy over all the stuff I've backed up on it.

And chances are, after I've figured out how to optimally backup everything, all of that stuff I didn't use is probably going to be backed up on that 2TB drive, so I could access it all much quicker by just taking the 2TB drive out of easily accessible storage from my curio cabinet drawer and plugging it directly into my computer. The only time I'd probably ever need the 15TB again would be to backup additions to the streaming drive or to use those backups to create a new one if my streaming drive ever crapped out on me.

That will be nice. Because using the drive itself is a production. It goes into "sleep" mode after a certain amount of idle time. You might not notice that change... the sound that it makes when it is idling or doing minimal tasks, vs sudden absence of noise when it falls asleep. But boy, do you notice the noise it makes when you wake it from its slumber.

It only occurs to me now how nice it will be not ever having to listen to that anymore as a regular part of my day.

Man...

It's kind of crazy the things you just learn to put up with that you don't need to put up with...

Making your space work for you is just as important with your tech as it is in real life.

I think in the back of my head I always knew I had all of these possible, potential extra tools at my disposal without the need to go out and buy more shit.

I've just sat on it all for so long and never tackled all of these projects.

There's definitely a reason for that. Doing this stuff isn't easy, and it's very time consuming. Staying on task is HARD... and if you don't finish it, you lose your place and forget what you've already done.

I'm almost there now though.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 1:14 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

A shower, a bowl of beef vegetable soup, a comfy place to lie down.

Aaaahhh.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 1:15 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Dbl

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 1:15 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Just in case you didn't get it the first two times!

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 1:45 PM