285: More Free Space Than Free Time

00:00SPEAKERBrad I got some novelty chips the other day like semiconductor type chips

00:05SPEAKERNo, like lays basically wrong podcast man. Wait, we have a we have a food podcast. Wait, we do now

00:12SPEAKEROh hell yeah. No, I got I so I was going to a barbecue last weekend for Easter 2.0 and

00:19SPEAKERBecause of the first we and we had to we talked about this in the patron episode, I think but we had to delay

00:25SPEAKEREaster one week because some of the kids that participate in our Easter festivities were sick the weekend of

00:30SPEAKERand they had Easter - we had Easter - Easter harder and

00:34SPEAKERI went to the grocery store and I made like I made like a you know, a corn salad, you know something

00:39SPEAKERyou know a low-taste salad like a like a

00:42SPEAKEREsquites like the you know, it's like good cheese and corn and mayo and peppers and good stuff. I made that and

00:51SPEAKERWhen I was at the grocery store getting stuff for that I saw this this new new summer chips have dropped

00:58SPEAKERBecause lays every year now does like novelty flavors for the summer. It's the best most wonderful time of the year

01:03SPEAKERYes, I mean it's one like we've moved out of candy season now we're into into barbecue season

01:08SPEAKERSo I bought a bag of honey barbecue lays just plain chips. Wait, those were not the novelty ones

01:14SPEAKERI hope those are novelty. Wait, that's really honey barbecue novelty flavor

01:18SPEAKERYeah, it's like barbecue, but it's sweet sounds pretty sure but I mean like as as like the the wide and diverse range of potato chip

01:26SPEAKERflavors goes

01:28SPEAKERThat sounds a little pedestrian these days. Okay, look, it's not an all dressed. I like an all dressed

01:32SPEAKERI like I like your ketchup. I like your sriracha flavored chips

01:36SPEAKERHere they'll pick it still is a garden variety at this point, man. Sure

01:41SPEAKERBut uh, but so yeah, okay

01:43SPEAKERSo the honey barbecue chips is just like barbecue potato chips sure no change last year

01:49SPEAKERThe novelty chips were like garlic bread, right? That's a little more. That was a nightmare. Wait, really? They were terrible what?

01:56SPEAKERReally gross. You're done. Hmm. I'm struggling to think of any situation that garlic does not improve on

02:01SPEAKERI'm gonna go and tell you it was not good

02:03SPEAKERIt was it was too like the the balance of garlic to potato was punishing

02:08SPEAKERSo not what you wanted in favor of too much garlic too much garlic. It's

02:13SPEAKERImpossible it was it was not just too much garlic. It was really sharp

02:16SPEAKERYou know how like when you when you use a piece of garlic that has a little bit of green in it

02:20SPEAKERIt's maybe gone over and started to sprout. Sure. Yeah, it tasted like that. It was bad undercooked or something

02:26SPEAKERNot it was yeah undercooked or it wasn't like I like a sweet garlic, right?

02:30SPEAKERI like to I like to taste the garlic. I wanted to seep into my pores. This just made me hurt

02:35SPEAKERThey're not trying anymore

02:37SPEAKERIt feels like cuz I mean you would get you would get like Thanksgiving stuffing flavored or like turkey and gravy

02:42SPEAKERFlavored potato chips in previous years like they're just they're running out. Well, there were there were like the food scientists

02:48SPEAKERIt's like it's like a Taco Bell right like Taco Bell. There's like four key ingredients

02:53SPEAKERYes, and that's really the problem here is that all these flavors are actually just a combination of laboratory chemicals

02:58SPEAKERYeah, well look, we're all a combination of laboratory chemicals at this point, but the Doritos I'm gonna go tell you stone-cold bangers

03:06SPEAKERNow you and I know cuz we're old the Doritos started as a taco flavored chip

03:11SPEAKERYeah, like not sure. I think I think I remember when Cool Ranch came about

03:15SPEAKERI think I remember a time when Doritos were just the nacho cheese flavor. Oh, no, this is a gap between our ages

03:20SPEAKERWait, really before there was a nacho cheese flavor of Dorito. Wait, what there was a taco flavored Dorito what?

03:27SPEAKERThey sell them occasionally is like a throwback thing

03:30SPEAKERAnd it was like it was like chili powder flavored chips. It's the same chips triangles of corn

03:37SPEAKERThat instead of being nacho cheese flavored which was an 80s invention and then just they retconned away the taco flavored Dorito at that Wow

03:46SPEAKERSo the late-night taco flavored Dorito is basically just like that taco flavored Dorito, but maybe a little bit more of a modern

03:54SPEAKERModern twist like there's a little bit of a hint of avocado on there or something. Did you only eat avocado after dark?

04:01SPEAKERI mean, when do you eat our avocado during the daytime?

04:16SPEAKER[music]

04:32SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad.

04:37SPEAKERI sometimes just open up an avocado and I put a little salt on it and then eat it with a spoon. Like out of the

04:44SPEAKERWhat do you call that, the rind? Skin, rind, shell? Seems too thick to be skin, husk.

04:50SPEAKERI think it's a skin. Isn't an avocado a seed? Oh gosh. So that would be the shell, right?

04:55SPEAKERWell, is it wait, is it itself a seed or is it a fruit because it has a seed in it, right?

04:59SPEAKERIt has a pit. I mean, I assume that's a seed. That's the pit. I think the pit is the, hold on

05:04SPEAKERAvocado, what is this, anatomy? Sure. Oh, this is gonna be bad

05:11SPEAKERAvocado, an anatomy of the avocado fruit. There we go. It's a berry. It is a fruit. Wait. Okay. Well, it's a fruit then.

05:17SPEAKERIt's a big berry. You know why it's a berry? It's because

05:20SPEAKERStegosaurus ate them and then pooped them out. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah, they're

05:27SPEAKEREvolutionarily designed to be eaten by dinosaurs. Is that a real thing? There's a real thing. Yeah. No, I haven't have have prehistoric

05:35SPEAKERAvocado fossils been discovered. I don't know about that, but that's why I read that on the internet

05:40SPEAKERSo it's got to be true. Of course. Yes

05:42SPEAKEROkay, the avocado fruit is a berry of one carpal containing a single seed the mature fuerte fruit

05:48SPEAKERIs it notably asymmetrical at the apex as a result of differential growth on opposite sides?

05:54SPEAKERThe berry carp. Yes. Is the store-bought avocado the thing that we typically consume?

05:59SPEAKERIs that the final form of the avocado or would it continue to I mean it would turns into a tree eventually if you plant it

06:04SPEAKERYeah, I guess so. Yeah, but I mean like is it pulled is it pulled from the tree at the height of its

06:10SPEAKERLike development or does the there's the fruit?

06:13SPEAKERContinue to mature I guess is what I'm asking if it's a berry then the next step after

06:17SPEAKERRipeness would be falling off and rotting. Yeah fair on the ground probably, right?

06:21SPEAKERI don't know but I know that the pair of carp consists of three layers the exocarp which comprises the skin or rind

06:28SPEAKERThe fleshy mesocarp, which is the edible portion of the fruit and a thin inner layer next to the outer seed coat the endocarp

06:36SPEAKERThere you go. Welcome to the avocast. Yeah, this is like now I want an avocado. Okay, I'm just going yes

06:44SPEAKERI want an avocado tree

06:46SPEAKERThat's I'm not sure that I will ever live in a climate that could support such a thing

06:49SPEAKERBut there's if I could have one fruiting tree in my entire life. It would be an avocado tree

06:54SPEAKERIf I could only have one, okay, absolutely under bombing not least because avocados are kind of expensive

07:01SPEAKERWell, and they take so we only buy avocados when they're cheap. So like we have it's like the McRib for us, right?

07:06SPEAKERLike when the avocado prices get to a certain point, it's avocado to his time in the Smith household exactly same

07:12SPEAKERWhat if you just walk out into your yard anytime you wanted were you were you there when the avocado board sent us a?

07:19SPEAKERcouple of crates of avocados it tested think so

07:23SPEAKERWe just like they were they reached out to norm and we're like, hey

07:26SPEAKERWe love we'd love to see what you guys test with a bunch of avocados and we're like, okay and we'll take a bunch of avocados

07:31SPEAKERWhat did you test we just ate a bunch of avocados?

07:35SPEAKERTested how many avocados you could eat? Yeah, it turns out all of them is the answer. Yeah

07:39SPEAKERYeah, it was a real race to get done before the box went bad

07:42SPEAKERBut um, I wonder how many avocados it would take before you started regretting your choices like a dozen maybe dude

07:49SPEAKERI I will if you want city to be clear

07:51SPEAKEROh one sitting like like it like end to end like finish one and start the next until you can't anymore like

07:58SPEAKERSounds like there's only one way to find this out Brad

08:00SPEAKERWe're gonna have to get the avocado board back on the phone paid next next month's patron exclusive

08:05SPEAKERIt's just us eating avocados for three hours, especially after the tariffs kick in that's gonna be the only way to eat avocados

08:11SPEAKERThis is I mean, this is like crabs though, right?

08:13SPEAKERLike I can sit down you you put me out in front of a bushel of blue crabs and all the thing that will break

08:17SPEAKERIsn't my ability to eat crabs. It's eventually my fingers are too bloody and raw to pick more crabs. Yep. Yep. Yeah, so

08:24SPEAKERand speaking of picking crabs

08:27SPEAKERthis week's episode is

08:29SPEAKERBrought to you by a listener who had a question that was too

08:34SPEAKERsubstantial a question for our monthly Q&A episode

08:38SPEAKERUnconventional. Yeah, the first time we've ever done this

08:40SPEAKERWe have plucked a question from the Q&A that didn't get answered and turned it into a whole episode

08:44SPEAKERIt's the first time that we remembered who asked the question so we could credit them. So thanks to Streli Dan

08:51SPEAKERWho asked how do you organize your files from a folder structure slash schema standpoint?

08:57SPEAKERI'm terrible at creating folder structures and as such have a mess of project folders old desktop backups and document folders

09:03SPEAKERThat should really be unified. Mm-hmm. It's a good question. It is and

09:08SPEAKERSo we're gonna we're gonna kind of take two

09:11SPEAKERTwo approaches to this because the thing that came out of us talking about this a little bit at least for me

09:17SPEAKERwas that I do all of my

09:20SPEAKERdesktop organization

09:22SPEAKERSo that I can back stuff up easily so that I have easy routes to back up for the data

09:29SPEAKERThat's important to me and so that I don't have to back up the enormous two terabyte games folder

09:34SPEAKERThat's on my hard drive that I can just redownload from Steam if something happens to that to that drive. Sure

09:40SPEAKERThat makes sense. Yeah, so

09:42SPEAKERI think let's you start with file organization and like the final structure on and

09:47SPEAKERWe separated these into like desktop and NAS. Yeah, I didn't put a NAS section down on my I didn't think about that

09:54SPEAKERBut yeah

09:55SPEAKERI think this is maybe going to expand a little beyond the specific question of folder and file structure

10:01SPEAKERSo yeah a little more like, you know, what what are our kind of volumes, you know, like how do we have our drives arranged?

10:06SPEAKERWhat do we use each one for? I think I think that's fair. Like what goes on a desktop versus a server or a NAS that kind

10:12SPEAKEROf thing do you have so let's let's start at the basics on your desktop PC. Do you have more than one drive?

10:18SPEAKEROh, yes, as of now when I built this new machine

10:25SPEAKERI put three new NVMe drives in it one is a system drive and the other two lashed together

10:31SPEAKERInto one volume as a games drive Windows storage spaces to the rescue. Yes. Okay

10:36SPEAKERI have since put three more SSDs into this machine in the last three months. That's absolute madness. I mean, they're old ones

10:43SPEAKERThey are all old SATA SSDs. One is a one terabyte SATA SSD to put Linux distros on

10:48SPEAKERThat I respect the other two are small old SATA SSDs for like scratch space one of them

10:53SPEAKEROne of them I put in there to use as a kind of a makeshift thumb drive

10:58SPEAKERLike download, you know download a Linux ISO. Yes, instead of having to fish for a thumb drive

11:04SPEAKERThat might not work anymore because thumb drives are the least reliable storage in the history of storage

11:08SPEAKERI just write that ISO to that internal SSD instead boot from that. Okay, so

11:15SPEAKERI'm I'm kind of in awe but also

11:20SPEAKERBecause of like that is that is really stupid and brilliant

11:24SPEAKERFascinates like it's real fast. What do you what do you I like Rufus for writing images to USB thumb drives?

11:30SPEAKERWhat do you use? Well, so I just discovered ventoid the other day

11:33SPEAKERYeah

11:34SPEAKERventoid is a whole other subject that was like is this just gonna turn into a generic like here's a bunch of fun storage tricks

11:40SPEAKERepisode I mean maybe but then so ventoid instead of having to like burn your ISO cuz like just to be clear I have

11:48SPEAKERSix different thumb drives that are in my in my bag for when I go to PC world for like Windows installs and Linux installs

11:55SPEAKERand and bazite and holo ISO and all these other goofy Linux variants and then I

12:02SPEAKERdiscovered ventoid the other day when I was looking up cache EOS and

12:06SPEAKERventoid you just

12:08SPEAKERBasically, you put some business on the on the thumb drive and then you just copy the ISOs to it

12:13SPEAKERIt'll let you boot any of the ISOs from a menu. Yeah, it's basically it's basically a very minimal little boot

12:18SPEAKERLoader, I think it's like space but I'm not sure but but yeah

12:21SPEAKERIt'll it'll effectively chain boot any ISO that you put on that drive

12:24SPEAKERSo what I'm saying is you should just ventoid up your internal drive and then just copy ISOs over there

12:29SPEAKERYou don't have to ever use Rufus again. That is

12:33SPEAKERPossibly worth doing I might try that I've had I've had mixed results with ventoid, but I don't think it's been twice fault

12:38SPEAKERI think it was actually something to do with the specific Linux ISOs that I was trying to boot and

12:43SPEAKERissues issues with compatibility on this motherboard because I

12:48SPEAKERDon't you may be shocked to hear that Linux on like very modern hardware still kind of dodgy. It's exciting. I'm sure

12:56SPEAKERFirst like not good exciting just to be clear

12:58SPEAKERIt's it's it's the kind of thing where like you kind of take it for granted that Windows is just going to

13:03SPEAKERSupport any brand new hardware, although even Windows is a little spotty about that

13:06SPEAKERYeah, if it's like if it's like a motherboard that came out like two weeks ago, but well, yeah

13:12SPEAKERThere's always hoops you have to jump through if yours and if your stuffs not built into Windows and anyway long story short

13:16SPEAKERI think I was blaming ventoid for a while for issues that actually were to do with distros

13:20SPEAKERI was trying to boot maybe maybe I will just put ventoid on that internal SSD. So so anyway

13:26SPEAKERSo I I'm a much simpler install. I have four SSDs

13:30SPEAKERFor NVMe SSDs three of them are just slammed together into a Windows storage space

13:36SPEAKERArray that is like game of them. Look I had four slots. Are they all two terabytes?

13:43SPEAKERThey're all two terabytes. Are they all the exact same model?

13:46SPEAKERYes, they are and you have six terabytes of games and scrumble, but you're putting like Unreal Engine projects on there, right?

13:51SPEAKERSo that's the thing is like when I'm working on on actual shipping games. Those projects are enormous

13:56SPEAKERthey're three four hundred gigs easy cheese and

13:59SPEAKERSometimes you have multiple copies of them. So

14:02SPEAKERyeah, so anyway, I I

14:05SPEAKERhave six terabytes of storage in that in that array that I then have to figure out how to back up and I also have

14:12SPEAKERlike

14:13SPEAKERLike that's that's my work disk for like video edit stuff and podcast stuff and all of the other stuff

14:18SPEAKERWhich is varying sizes of files and then my C Drive is just like the game I play most

14:25SPEAKERWhich is usually like used to be pub G these days

14:27SPEAKERIt's Fortnite and hell I think hell divers is on that partition and then all applications and then my my home folder is

14:35SPEAKERwhere

14:36SPEAKERA lot of stuff actually a lot of stuff lives

14:39SPEAKERI've started putting like my OBS set up and all the different things that I use on the on the day-to-day

14:44SPEAKERLive in that home folder now. I see I see the good word of portable apps is spreading

14:48SPEAKERI so I'm up and down on portable apps again. Like I think some of them are really good

14:53SPEAKERI still think that like OBS as a portable app is not for me

14:57SPEAKERPrecisely, I use enough plugins and stuff that portable OBS is a little hinky

15:01SPEAKERI will say like the the stream deck plugin for OBS definitely requires a few backflips to get to work with a portable install. Yeah

15:08SPEAKERYeah, so so for me like if the plug-in if the stuff that you requires the backflips doesn't work as a portable then it's no

15:14SPEAKERThere's no reason for me to make it portable. That's fair

15:16SPEAKERI don't use fan control as a portable anymore because it's a pain in the ass to update when it's portable and yeah

15:21SPEAKERIt's not like that anything like that. I'm doing through scoop the package manager at this point. Yeah, that's it

15:27SPEAKERThat's why so hang on. Is that six is that three drive six terabyte volume? Is that just stripes? No redundancy

15:33SPEAKERYeah, I'm living on the edge man. I back it up real. Okay. Well if you're backing everything up some fine

15:38SPEAKERwell, okay, so two terabytes of that is probably steam folder because I'm pretty bad about not deleting games that I'm not really playing anymore steam

15:45SPEAKERFolders fine. You can just redownload game installs. Yeah, they long

15:48SPEAKERthere's

15:50SPEAKER500 gigs 600 gigs of like Perforce mirrors for various projects that I'm on and then there's

15:59SPEAKERLike game prototypes that I built like just a big folder projects that also has engine installs in it

16:05SPEAKERSo like when you like when you're working with unreal

16:10SPEAKER4.27 or 5.1 or 5.2 or 5.3. You have to have each of those engines installed and

16:16SPEAKEREach of those is pretty sub they're hefty. So they're 40 or 50 gigs. So that's like another

16:21SPEAKER100 gigs 200 gigs something like that

16:24SPEAKERand then

16:27SPEAKERLet's see. What else?

16:28SPEAKERIt's like like I so then the rest of my structure

16:31SPEAKERI guess the way to the way to say this is the rest of my structure is pretty straightforward

16:35SPEAKERI have a folder for audio. I have a folder for consulting jobs. I have a folder for

16:40SPEAKERGit repos that I synced down for either other people's projects or for like tools that I download and run

16:48SPEAKERLike Python scripts and stuff like that

16:51SPEAKERI have an image at image edits folder laser cutting projects

16:55SPEAKERgame mods

16:57SPEAKERThat's mostly stuff I've made

17:00SPEAKERBackups, what is this? Oh, that's just an empty folder. That's always good. And then then folders for like newsletter podcast video edits

17:09SPEAKERPC world stuff

17:10SPEAKERold stray bomb bay stuff stuff like that

17:13SPEAKERSo wait, this is like pretty much everything you work with live primarily on your machine

17:16SPEAKERI'm excluding backups here, but like theme the primary copies of all the data you care about lives on your desktop not on your server

17:22SPEAKERSo as a peasant who only has one gigabit connections between my desktop and my PC and my and my certain server. Yes

17:30SPEAKERMy so my NAS lives in the garage

17:32SPEAKERThere's I'll see one

17:35SPEAKERtwo runs under the house and

17:39SPEAKERTwo switches three switches between here and there that would require

17:43SPEAKERme to do some fairly substantial belly crawling under the house to run like a direct fiber line or even like a

17:50SPEAKERCat six because I when I but when I did the house cat six was still fairly expensive

17:56SPEAKERSo I did cat 5e and while you can do 2.5 gigabit on 5e my switches don't do

18:02SPEAKERLike I don't want to have to replace a bunch of switches and stuff to do that. Yep

18:05SPEAKERYep, that gets to be a big commitment for sure. It's pretty expensive. Yes

18:10SPEAKERLet's see. Where should we go from here? I guess I could talk about what the rest of what I do with my desktop data wise

18:16SPEAKERYeah

18:19SPEAKERAre you are you immutable these days? Are you immutable windows? Is that where you're going? Wait, is that a thing?

18:24SPEAKERNot yet, but I think that's the windows 12 is gonna be hang on

18:29SPEAKERI'm just typing immutable windows and Google before we move on. I need to know

18:34SPEAKEROkay, I don't see anything official at all about that no, that's that's like look everybody else has done it why not Microsoft

18:40SPEAKERThey I mean, yeah, they have to be I mean that absolutely seems like the way operating systems are going probably with good reason

18:46SPEAKERRight, like it's it's always what Windows 12 is gonna do

18:49SPEAKERso my understanding is that snapdragon windows 4 arm is is a more the kernels mutable for sure and

18:56SPEAKERbits and pieces of the OS

18:58SPEAKERbehave and I'm in an immutable manner, but I don't think that it's like immutable in the same way that say, you know

19:05SPEAKERFedora blue or something is right or Mac OS which is basically like forton for knocks at this point. Yeah

19:12SPEAKERlet's see, okay, so

19:14SPEAKERI'm trying to think how to put this like I don't really do much

19:19SPEAKERPermanent data on my desktop anymore. It's kind of weird when I was writing up notes for this and it occurred to me like

19:25SPEAKEROkay on

19:27SPEAKERThese the C colon fronts the system drive front

19:30SPEAKERI don't touch anything on the C drive at this point outside of my home folder like

19:33SPEAKEROkay, boring things with like a couple I think I've got a couple of nurse off utilities that run straight from the root of C

19:40SPEAKERBecause it was easier from a permission standpoint or something

19:43SPEAKERBut like yeah, I don't I don't even treat the C drive as a place to put my data anymore outside of the home folder

19:48SPEAKERLike what is so like desktop documents downloads all that stuff works downloads like the home folder the ones that Windows creates for you

19:55SPEAKERLike desktop, I've got stuff all over my desktop

19:56SPEAKERIt's a giant mess, but like I download stuff to the downloads folder

20:00SPEAKERBut outside of that I consider C to be like no-man's land at this point

20:03SPEAKERlike I have I know people who I know people who still bristle at the like Microsoft Store Windows apps

20:10SPEAKERSort of scheme of like hey, you're not supposed to open this folder

20:14SPEAKERWe're not letting you you know touch the files in here like some people some people very much are like fuck you

20:19SPEAKERThis is my drive. I can do anything. I want with the files on it. I've gone completely the other direction

20:24SPEAKERI'm just like forget it man. Like I'm not even messing with program files at this point just

20:28SPEAKERInstall what you want where you want. I'm not gonna worry about it

20:31SPEAKERI'm just gonna let the software the installers the OS manage all those locations

20:35SPEAKERSo like have you gone so far as to have like the snipping tool and OBS and stuff that typically save stuff inside your profile

20:43SPEAKERSave elsewhere. No, I leave those default locations. Okay, okay

20:47SPEAKERSo like pretty much pretty much all the like home folder behavior that I got as far as I can think of I've got at

20:52SPEAKERDefault, so that's wild. So like I said, I use everything all those paths in the home folder all the time

20:56SPEAKERBut like outside of that, I don't even consider the C drive like a drive to use

21:00SPEAKERI guess that's that's kind of the way I use it, too

21:03SPEAKERI guess I don't I don't have like sub folders on C outside of my profile

21:07SPEAKERLike I don't see the utility of it at this point to be frank

21:09SPEAKERLike I don't see what the point is, but I mean it but again, I've got like I'm as we'll get to in a minute

21:14SPEAKERI've got mass amounts of storage elsewhere to put stuff that

21:17SPEAKERPeople who just have a more simple like gaming machine with one system drive, of course would put that on their C drive

21:22SPEAKERWell, yeah, but there's something really nice about saying

21:25SPEAKEROkay, the only thing I have to back up from my C drive is like my home my profile folder, right? Yeah

21:31SPEAKERAnd that's exactly it and that's kind of why I hate that

21:35SPEAKERWindows home folder is still such a mess

21:38SPEAKERlike the app data folder is such

21:43SPEAKERYes, like I wish I wish the contents of the home folder world and we're simplified and it was easier to just move the whole

21:49SPEAKERThing back and forth. It's it's funny. One of the things that's happened in the last couple of years is I'm starting to see a lot

21:54SPEAKERmore

21:55SPEAKERLike dot dot by like hidden folders in your home folder. Yeah

22:02SPEAKERThat are just like Linux Unix style, you know dot whatever file name in that folder, which is which is

22:09SPEAKERLike that seems like a relatively new innovation. Yeah, I'm looking at what's in there right now of note

22:16SPEAKERMy dot directories. Oh, there's a dot SSH a dot MPV a dot making KV

22:21SPEAKERI have a dot one password a dot infinity. Okay a dot cache

22:26SPEAKERI've got it. I've got a I've got a dot D bus key rings, which D bus is a Linux thing

22:31SPEAKERI'm not sure why that's there. There's a dot insomniac which I assume is insomniac game like spider-man

22:39SPEAKERInteresting, that's cool. Yeah, I have virtual box. I have SSH. I have a bunch of Linux stuff

22:43SPEAKERI have some a like a lava and stuff like that. Yeah, but yeah, it's it's um, I have dot bun

22:50SPEAKERI can't roll a dot but bun is I also have dot bun. I believe that came from

22:56SPEAKERThe Kindle remember the Kindle DRMageddon. Oh, that's right. That is exactly what it came from. I think I think bun was some kind of

23:04SPEAKERSomething yeah package manager thing or something. Yeah, that makes sense. So anyway backing up all that stuff. So so

23:12SPEAKEROkay, so this all makes sense to me and then what do you so that everything gets stored on your nest?

23:16SPEAKERYeah, and I'll say like I said, I've got that big D drive

23:19SPEAKERThat is basically just games like I don't partially because I don't trust storage spaces. I did lose

23:25SPEAKERAges ago. I lost a striped storage space as a volume

23:28SPEAKERIt just kind of erupted for some reasons as a storage space or a dynamic disk. It was a storage space

23:33SPEAKERThis was someone who's ten four years five years ago something like that. Okay

23:38SPEAKERI have no idea what happened there. It just kind of stopped working and I had to recreate it

23:42SPEAKERBut again, I don't put anything but game installs on there. So that's fine. Yeah

23:46SPEAKERTrust it. That's pretty safe these days because most game installs

23:50SPEAKERlike for in the early days of steam even the first decade you kind of could lose save files that way fairly regularly because people

23:57SPEAKERUsed to write their save files into the steam folder, but it seems like that stuff all ends up in app data these days

24:02SPEAKERYeah, I actually wiped that drive recently

24:04SPEAKERI was like if you want to hear more about this go listen to the patron episode

24:07SPEAKERWe just posted but I'm thinking about moving that drive to butter FS for Windows

24:13SPEAKERbut I had a why I went wiped it and went through all the I have

24:17SPEAKERsteam epic battle net

24:20SPEAKERMicrosoft store and Microsoft store. Yes

24:22SPEAKERI've got all those game installs on there and I couldn't find any save files for any of the games as

24:27SPEAKERI went through those directories. Yeah, and I when I wiped that drive

24:30SPEAKERSo I think if you have a dedicated games drive like that these days

24:33SPEAKERI think it is pretty safe to just wipe it at will so that one exception is that I have

24:39SPEAKERI have a handful of really kind of old games at this point

24:43SPEAKERYes

24:43SPEAKERI've done some modding on like X-wing Alliance and Kotor and stuff like that and I do back those up because

24:50SPEAKERprocess of getting Kotor one modded and running right was

24:55SPEAKERSubstantial and time-consuming. Yes

24:56SPEAKERso in fact

24:57SPEAKERI do have a miscellaneous directory on the games drive in which currently I only have the

25:01SPEAKERFallout 1 community edition and Ares the emulator

25:05SPEAKERBut yes, you're right

25:07SPEAKERThat is that's basically the place for games that are old or just like an open source thing that you're just unzipping a zip file

25:12SPEAKERInto a directory that kind of yeah, yeah, they can move gog stuff - yes

25:18SPEAKERthe point is like

25:20SPEAKERyeah, and writing these notes up has made me realize that my

25:24SPEAKERDesktops not exactly a dumb terminal in the classic sense of all the actual contents are on another machine remotely

25:29SPEAKERBut it's kind of leaning in that direction now with the exception of those home folder

25:34SPEAKERYeah trees that I mentioned and like I guess I'll just say real quick what I use my desktop for is

25:40SPEAKERMostly just dragging things on to with it. I've like want to deal with at a later time

25:45SPEAKERWait, do you show your icons on the desktop? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah. No, that's that's on a desktop

25:50SPEAKERYou can't see him. How many items are on your desktop? Oh, we've run this exercise before I pared it down a lot

25:56SPEAKERThanks ago. So 55 icons currently. Oh, I win 76. Yeah. Okay. Alright, like this is stupid

26:04SPEAKERbut like I will I will drag the from the URL bar in Chrome to the desktop a lot of times when I

26:11SPEAKERWant to save like an article I want to read but I don't want to just bookmark it because if I bookmark it

26:15SPEAKERI'll just forget about it forever

26:16SPEAKERIf I drag that's everything if I drag it onto the desktop as a dot URL

26:20SPEAKERThen the icon is sitting there silently staring at me and I have to either

26:25SPEAKERclick on it and read it later or

26:27SPEAKERForce myself to deal with it or just be annoyed by its existence

26:30SPEAKERYou know what? I mean? Like it's a little bit more of an annoying reminder of hey, there's a thing

26:33SPEAKERI meant to read at some point. This is what I use pocket for

26:36SPEAKERYeah, I there are probably better methods for this but I've probably got like at least a dozen or 15 of those 55 or articles

26:42SPEAKERSitting here. There you go videos I download from YouTube. Like I like to grab

26:48SPEAKERStuff off of YouTube to watch later. Oh, yeah. I just hold my phone up and record it off the phone. Yeah, that works

26:53SPEAKERYeah, and the one the one like official formal thing

26:57SPEAKERI use my desktop for is I've moved to doing like all my podcast editing from the C Drive

27:02SPEAKERSo I've got just a like I keep all the podcast projects that I've been working on recently there

27:07SPEAKERIt's like in a in a folder

27:09SPEAKERJust a folder on the desktop just for like kind of immediacy reasons, you know, not having to worry about any issues working on

27:14SPEAKERthere are there would be cases where I have like a

27:17SPEAKERpodcast project open in audacity and then I would like a pre-boot my NAS for some reason unrelated to working on a podcast and

27:23SPEAKERThen be like what is what's going on with audacity? Why is this not working? Oh, right, you know, like

27:28SPEAKERThere's just something about working on like a project that's got a bunch of data files associated with it

27:33SPEAKERIt's nice to not have any point of failure between you and the data

27:37SPEAKERSo so the thing I do

27:40SPEAKERThe thing I do with my desktop is it's the it's like the holding ground for projects that don't have a permanent home

27:46SPEAKERSure. Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah. Yeah like so

27:50SPEAKERfor example

27:51SPEAKERif I download something that's

27:52SPEAKERImportant that I want to make sure I keep I move it out of like anything that I need to keep I move out of downloads

27:57SPEAKERBecause I just wipe downloads every couple of weeks. So it doesn't get out of control. Oh, that's something I should I should really do that

28:04SPEAKERI should really hold myself to that. Let me see. What is the oldest download?

28:08SPEAKERI have in here

28:11SPEAKERFiles from mid 2023 at the bottom of my downloads folder. Yep, that's too old

28:17SPEAKER123 items that's not so bad

28:19SPEAKERYeah, I don't want to I have a lot of stuff in there right now excited. I've been I've been downloading a lot this week

28:24SPEAKERbut but uh, yeah, so I I

28:27SPEAKERGenerally go through and delete everything and downloads every once in a while and desktop is because I used to work out of downloads

28:33SPEAKERWhich was a problem because then it becomes hard to go through and like you're like, oh, is this the important one?

28:38SPEAKERIs this the copy of it or so?

28:41SPEAKERDesktop is the place for truth downloads is the ephemeral place that can go away with it at any moment

28:47SPEAKERYes

28:48SPEAKERFor me downloads is the unchanged place like like whatever's in downloads is exactly what came off of whatever server I download

28:54SPEAKERYeah, that works too. Yeah

28:56SPEAKERyou use the

28:57SPEAKERDo you like this view that file Explorer defaults to in Windows 11 in downloads?

29:02SPEAKERWhich is called the one like the days

29:06SPEAKERGroup by I think that's relatively new if you right-click in the folder, you know

29:10SPEAKERThere's there's view where you can do like details or icons or whatever and then sort by which of course is by like name and modified

29:16SPEAKERso the benefit of group by is that

29:18SPEAKERWhen you unzip a folder then it shows up at the top even if you sort by date modified. Mm-hmm

29:24SPEAKERBecause normally it does all the files first and then it does all the folders first or vice versa. Yeah, I

29:30SPEAKERI am generally a just sort by date modified and then if I need to get the folders I sort by name

29:37SPEAKERYeah, that's I should probably turn off the group. I've defaults. I think is group by modified. It's group by yeah

29:42SPEAKERIt annoys me for for people who can't vision or aren't able to visualize what I'm trying to talk about here

29:48SPEAKERIt'll have like a block of files at the top that are like today and then a block under that that's yesterday and then a block

29:53SPEAKERUnder that that's like last week and then last month and then a long time ago

29:56SPEAKERYeah, and I'm I go back and forth on the usefulness of that

30:00SPEAKERbut

30:01SPEAKERHonestly, if they would if they would let you sort folders if they didn't if they didn't separate the sorting on folders and files

30:08SPEAKERI would never use the group by because like Mac OS

30:12SPEAKERJust sorts the entire contents of the folder whether it's a file or a folder by the date. I think Linux works the same way

30:20SPEAKERBut because windows sorts all the files first and then does all the file the folders after that

30:25SPEAKERThen it then it means that like you have to do two sorts basically, which is annoying

30:30SPEAKERYou know about you know about the shift click sort trick, but no

30:34SPEAKERSo if you like if you sort by modified and file explorer, it'll it'll stick all the files at the top

30:39SPEAKERLike you said, yeah

30:40SPEAKERBut then if you then shift click a name it will then put all the folders at the top but still sorted by modified

30:47SPEAKERWhat your eyes are white thing here? This is amazing

30:51SPEAKERI don't know where I learned that but like sort by modified and then shift click name to then

30:56SPEAKERBump the folders back up to above the files. Oh my god, that's life-changing still but still sorted by modified. Yep

31:03SPEAKERThat's amazing. That's very good. Yes

31:06SPEAKERanyway

31:08SPEAKERWe move on to

31:10SPEAKERYeah, what's going on - I know I know like not everybody's gonna have a home server or NAS to put bulk data on

31:16SPEAKERBut that's just happens to be where most of my data is. So we need to talk about it here

31:19SPEAKERYeah, the type of stuff that would have been on my PC ten years ago

31:24SPEAKERWell, this is the stuff that I keep on my D drive right most because like I use my nest to back up the D

31:28SPEAKERDrive, but I don't work off of it just because most of the files I work with are too big to go across the network

31:33SPEAKERYeah, okay. So my my my giant bulk storage pool on my NAS which is called mass

31:40SPEAKERThat's good. That's pretty good like mas or mas s mas s

31:44SPEAKEROkay, or mass storage because it's like 65 terabytes at this point

31:48SPEAKERI didn't know if you meant your NAS had a mass like it was the yeah

31:52SPEAKERSo that storage is broken up into a few ZFS data sets which are sort of like logical partitions basically

31:58SPEAKEROkay, they're broken up by kind of like purpose or category roughly

32:02SPEAKEROkay, so we should explain some stuff here for people because you so you're using ZFS still, right?

32:07SPEAKERYeah, and that means so in the terms of can you explain the difference between data sets and volumes in ZFS terms?

32:14SPEAKERI mean, it's sort of like a logical partition that exists inside the physical partition. You can perform operations on it

32:21SPEAKERYou can snapshot each data set separately. You can manage you can manage the snapshots which are backups effectively

32:26SPEAKERYou can you can say like hey, I want to snapshot this this backup data set once a day

32:31SPEAKERYou know snapshot this one that I put my work on every three hours

32:35SPEAKERYou don't I mean you can you can do discrete operations on different data sets and you also can control redundancy on data sets

32:41SPEAKERIs that right? Yeah, you can yeah, you can set all kinds of different policy stuff per on a per data set level

32:45SPEAKERI mean for for our purposes here just talking about organization

32:48SPEAKERYou can basically just think of these as big directories though. Yeah, just or drives you think of these as drives

32:52SPEAKERYeah for all intents and purposes drives and then you can put network shares inside those drives because for our purposes here

32:58SPEAKERWe're really just talking about what I use each one for so I've got I've got one called bulk

33:02SPEAKERThat is just kind of it's it's backups archives all of my long-term work storages on there

33:07SPEAKERSo like every project for this podcast that we've ever done all the patron episodes like Eagle documents

33:14SPEAKERmy dump for every old hard drive I've ever owned with the exception of a few very old ones at my parents house that I

33:21SPEAKERHaven't gotten around to trying to back up yet. What's your file structure like for that?

33:24SPEAKERYou just have like a folder name that that one that one is like a no-go zone

33:28SPEAKERthat one is or is it like so I have I have some spaces on my nest that are like

33:33SPEAKERIt's a there's a folder called old C drive and then inside that old C drive

33:37SPEAKERThere's an old C drive folder and then inside that one. There's an old C drive

33:41SPEAKEROkay, and I can go back to about 2012 like that maybe 2010. Yes

33:45SPEAKERJust deeper and deeper deeper and deeper. I'll tell you

33:49SPEAKERThen this is probably actually getting to really Dan's question a little more directly

33:53SPEAKEROr better or worse. I had for a long time and using exclamation marks as a way to flow something to the top of an alphabetical

33:58SPEAKERList. Oh, yeah, you do do that because that works just fine in Windows, but then it's a little less fine in

34:05SPEAKERNon Windows operating systems. Yep. It makes things a little bit more of a pain, but I've never quite gotten off of that

34:10SPEAKERAnyway, for whatever reason I've still got the directory

34:14SPEAKERThat is my old hard drives at the very top in a directory called exclamation mark old storage. Okay in there

34:22SPEAKERGood lord, there are three more all caps exclamation mark directories called back old and recovered

34:28SPEAKERThere's one under that called SSD. Okay, so your first SSD probably no idea

34:34SPEAKEROkay in that inside of that there is there's nothing but a downloads folder that it looks like it came from a Windows

34:40SPEAKERInstall of many years ago because there are files dated like 2013 in there. Gotcha

34:45SPEAKERLet's see. I've got oh these might have come from MacBooks as well. Some of these might be from like work MacBooks

34:51SPEAKERThere's under SSD there is Z back and then under that there is ZZ backup

34:56SPEAKERLook, okay, you want to get something at the bottom of the list you put a bunch of Z's in front of it fair

35:01SPEAKERAnyway, anyway if I were to go into like I'm looking for I know in one of these there is a nested like desktop one desktop

35:07SPEAKERTwo desktop three. Okay, like ten layers deep not seeing it at the moment

35:13SPEAKERbut the point is the dump of old hard drives is a giant mess of just like

35:17SPEAKEREvery time a new drive get them gets to archive or like I said there in some cases. It's been like hey, I'm

35:22SPEAKERIT wants to take back the MacBook when I was at CBS

35:24SPEAKERIt's like oh I got to turn in my MacBook for a new one

35:26SPEAKERI'm gonna back up the home folder of that MacBook and one of these two

35:29SPEAKERso it's just like the directory structure is entirely ad hoc I guess and that's

35:33SPEAKERReally my frustrating answer to Streetly Dan is that like within any one very limited domain?

35:40SPEAKERThere is some kind of organs organizing principle to the way I lay everything out

35:45SPEAKERBut it's all ad hoc from moment to moment right it's like I've got these old drives

35:49SPEAKERI'm gonna try to organize them in some way. I've got music over here

35:52SPEAKERI'm gonna do that in a different way

35:53SPEAKERBut like there's no there's no global organizing principle for every bit of data that I have you know what I mean well in fact in

35:58SPEAKERfact I would love to hear if there's anybody on the planet who actually does that because who has the time well so

36:04SPEAKERI

36:05SPEAKERMean I kind of do that, but I do it by data type right and and I also

36:09SPEAKERStructure things by how redundant I want them like in fact actually as I was setting up backup structures for my daughter's computer the other

36:15SPEAKERday I

36:16SPEAKERRealized I don't need to have like I'm actually spending a fair amount of hard drive space now

36:22SPEAKERbacking up computers to redundant arrays in the NAS

36:26SPEAKERBecause I don't need redundancy on those backups because they're already redundant right the original data is on the PC and

36:33SPEAKERThe the backup is the second copy so if the backup the back of those backups can safely be on a single drive

36:39SPEAKERWhich is what I would do if I just plug the external drives into everybody's computers in the house. Yep

36:44SPEAKERSo so for example I have on my on my nest I'm using an old technology now

36:51SPEAKERa

36:53SPEAKERsingle like

36:54SPEAKERFour disk array three disk array using butter FS that has redundancy there. You're welcome

37:02SPEAKERAnd I have different shares for different data types

37:06SPEAKERSo like I have all my video which has subfolders for movies and rip DVDs and blu-rays and TV shows

37:14SPEAKERAnd then there's also one for shorts for like Looney Tunes and Pixar shorts and stuff like that. I pulled off of discs

37:20SPEAKERAnd all that lives in a folder called video. There's a folder called music. That's all the music

37:25SPEAKERI've ripped there's a audio books and ebooks that is all the Kindle books and and

37:31SPEAKERLike

37:33SPEAKERripped CDs of my old hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy radio dramas from the BBC and stuff like that and

37:43SPEAKERSee I had then and then then we get to the criminal places. Oh, there's a there's a folder for backups

37:49SPEAKERThis is there's actually two folders for backups

37:51SPEAKERThere's one that's for backup backups

37:53SPEAKERAnd then I have another folder for file history on my desktop that we'll talk about in a little bit, which is which is neat

37:59SPEAKERbut

38:00SPEAKERWho knows how long they're gonna continue supporting that?

38:04SPEAKERThe

38:05SPEAKERThe crime place free Mike my crimes place is my public folder

38:09SPEAKERSo I have since I'm really the only one who uses the NAS

38:12SPEAKERThere's a folder on my NAS called public that's just open to everybody on the subnet read-write

38:19SPEAKERAnd it's kind of like I don't know like when I worked at the university for a while

38:24SPEAKERThey let us see into the dorm networks and you'd see just like file servers pop up

38:28SPEAKEROh, yeah, they were like it was like Jim's computer and then there'd be a bunch of pirated songs on it and stuff

38:34SPEAKERRight, and that was back when nobody put any kind of security or barrier to entry on their network shares whatsoever

38:39SPEAKERIt was back when people thought a firewall was the thing that keeps the fire from moving from one part of the building to the next

38:44SPEAKERpart of the building

38:46SPEAKERso

38:47SPEAKERYeah, so the public folder is is the oh I need this to be on a redundant drive

38:52SPEAKERBut I don't really know where to put it and my public it's a it's a source of great shame for me. Mm-hmm

38:59SPEAKERI'm gonna open up neti and

39:02SPEAKERTake a look at the pub a public. Oh, I also have a podcast folder. That's all the podcasts. I've archived

39:08SPEAKEROver the years. So like old copies of the maximum PC podcast and tested podcasts and stuff like that

39:15SPEAKERSo, yeah, like I have files from

39:18SPEAKER2015 in here respectable

39:22SPEAKER2013 some of this is copied over from a Windows home server that conked out a few years ago

39:28SPEAKERThose have the date of whenever I copied them over because they're definitely older than 2015

39:34SPEAKERBut yeah, so that's it like I have old streams I have

39:38SPEAKERVideo games I've ripped I have stuff that people sent me that I thought was funny stuff that I made for my kids class

39:45SPEAKERI have here's a config JSON file that I probably needed to get onto a Linux machine at some point. Mm-hmm

39:53SPEAKERyeah, I

39:55SPEAKERIt's oh, oh, this is a smart things to home bridge

40:01SPEAKERHome bridge to smart things

40:04SPEAKERConfig file I can just trash that I don't need that anymore. How long has since you used home bridge?

40:09SPEAKERSince I switched to home assistant whenever we started this podcast pretty much same. Yeah. All right

40:13SPEAKERI'll finish going through the top line of my stuff. I kind of rambled my way off the topic as I often do

40:19SPEAKERSo I've got that bulk data set. Like I said, which like arguably

40:22SPEAKERLike dumps of old hard drives and like legal documents and podcast backups or maybe don't belong in the same place

40:28SPEAKERThere's also like, you know backups of old iPhones on there. There's all kinds of stuff. Do you have search hooked up to this stuff?

40:34SPEAKERYeah, so I everything I use everything the wood the void tools everything. Yeah, I just have that index all of the

40:39SPEAKERsay this is one of the places where it's nice to mount all your network shares as letter as drive letters and windows because I

40:44SPEAKERCan just feed those drive letters of the network shares into everything and it'll index those just like their local Windows drives

40:50SPEAKERJust file names though, right?

40:53SPEAKERIt's only file name search not

40:56SPEAKERContents. Yeah, it's just files and folder names. Yes, and you know and basic, you know

41:02SPEAKERCreation and modified times and stuff like that. Yeah, and I can tell you everything is currently indexing just over three million objects

41:08SPEAKERThat's a lot of objects Brad

41:10SPEAKERIt is but like I said, I've got some of the drives that I've backed up to my NAS or like entire Windows installs

41:15SPEAKERSo like every single tiny file in a Windows install and all the program files directories and stuff are all on there still

41:21SPEAKERBecause I should probably just get rid of those but I have more free space than I have free time at this point

41:26SPEAKERI feel like the windows installs at this point are so small in comparison to the amount of storage available that it doesn't matter

41:32SPEAKERThat's exactly it

41:32SPEAKERYeah

41:33SPEAKERlike look there's something nice about being able to make an ISO of one of those folders that has a Windows install on and load it

41:38SPEAKERUp into a VHDI and see if it boots. That's you know, I should do that at some point actually

41:42SPEAKERthat would be fun and weird and in fact

41:44SPEAKERLike I've learned more about like drive imaging and partitioning and stuff since I backed those old drives up and at this point

41:50SPEAKERI would have just imaged those to like an image file at this point if I had it to do over again

41:55SPEAKERI mean those drives are all destroyed and gone at this point

41:58SPEAKERyeah, I feel like making ISOs of those it always felt like it was a

42:03SPEAKERan incredible waste of space back because I

42:06SPEAKERYeah, pretty consistently just save profile folders and then anything that I think might be useful

42:11SPEAKERwhich means I lost things like the custom spelunky sprite sheet that somebody made for me at one point and

42:18SPEAKERMy original spelunky save file and it's not all spelunky related. But like those are just the first two things I thought of

42:26SPEAKERYou're not wrong. I guess if you're imaging a drive you're getting all the free space on the drive as

42:31SPEAKERYou use space on your image as well. But also or you can compress it. I think the

42:36SPEAKERReal grognards on the discord discord could confirm this but I think that

42:41SPEAKERThe empty space and a disk image would compress down to practically nothing if I'm not mistaken

42:45SPEAKERI mean, there's even disk image formats that do that for you automatically, right?

42:49SPEAKERSo anyway, I keep going off topic, but let me just finish here

42:52SPEAKERUm, I've got that bulk directory, which is serve bulk data set, which is like arguably maybe too many mixed things in there

42:58SPEAKERBut it's my dumping ground for everything. That's kind of not media basically because I have a media data set just like you

43:04SPEAKERYeah, and like that is absolutely the place I do the most organization

43:07SPEAKERAnd are you are you doing data data set to share basically one data set per share? Yeah. Yeah, okay

43:14SPEAKERYeah, because we don't really need to get into the weeds but like the ZFS datasets there's I don't quite understand how this works

43:19SPEAKERbut there's like sort of a quasi physical barrier between each data set so that like

43:23SPEAKERIf you have two data sets in the same share and you try to copy a file

43:27SPEAKERIt'll do you know, it has to do a full copy from one data set to the other. It doesn't do an instant copy

43:31SPEAKERI don't know what the boundary is there anyway

43:34SPEAKERSo, okay got the bulk thing. I've got I've got the I've got the media data set like you

43:39SPEAKERI've got like I've literally got a directory called video and a directory called music just like you and you know within

43:44SPEAKERVideo, there's TV and movies

43:46SPEAKERDVD rip which is where I've ripped some old DVDs

43:49SPEAKERMusic is where my and a local music library lives. That's

43:53SPEAKERThat I've got hooked into music be which is that kind of iTunes equivalent that I use. I've got a got a folder for synth

44:00SPEAKERWhich is basically all the dumped music files from my consoles and stuff

44:04SPEAKERInteresting as I use, you know, I use all the food bar 2000 plugins that just emulate the sound engines of all the old consoles

44:10SPEAKERSo, you know, like, you know, like my my music library of the entire Super Nintendo

44:16SPEAKERI think we've talked about this before. Let me just see

44:20SPEAKERYou have a complete set of Super Nintendo

44:22SPEAKERI have a complete I have a complete set of the soundtrack of every SNES game ever released and it takes up 158 megabytes

44:28SPEAKEROh, I like this because it's just you know, it's just these synth files dumped from the cartridges that just get emulated and rendered

44:35SPEAKERYou know played back on the fly by the emulator plugins. So I've got that for most old consoles

44:40SPEAKERI've got I've still got my old iTunes library my kind of pre flack pre lossless old iTunes library

44:47SPEAKERJust in case I still need it in there. If there's anything weird or obscure. I want to go find that I can't

44:52SPEAKERCan't replicate anyway, but the point is like, you know to Strelian's question like the media of the media

44:59SPEAKERBucket is the place. I absolutely try to do the most actual

45:03SPEAKERconsistent

45:05SPEAKERRegimented organization. Oh and I've got a ROMs folder. I should say I've got like an old games folder as well like the media one

45:11SPEAKERI mean, I assume it's the same for you like

45:14SPEAKERFor me the media bucket is any file that's going to get served to like a client application on the network on another device, right?

45:21SPEAKERYeah, that's right. That's where like like some jellyfin are pulling its videos from from there

45:27SPEAKERLike music be which runs on my Windows machine is pulling the music library from there, even though it's on the server

45:32SPEAKERSo it's the same thing with like the mister pulls all of its ROMs from the ROMs directory on that media share. That's right

45:39SPEAKERI have the mister. I have a mister. I have a ROMs folder too

45:43SPEAKERAnd everything is oh, sorry

45:44SPEAKERAnd then also like virtual hard drives like when I don't I don't do a ton of 86 box and stuff like that

45:49SPEAKERBut like virtual hard drives for kind of booting virtual old computers also lives in that same kind of ROMs

45:55SPEAKERSo I actually keep those on my D drive just because so I for my work at PC world. I keep

46:01SPEAKERKeep clean Windows 10 and Windows 11 pro and home

46:06SPEAKERimages

46:08SPEAKERjust in case I want to grab screenshots or something from an

46:10SPEAKERmunged up Windows 11 install and

46:13SPEAKERI keep those on the local machine just because with Windows 11 Windows 10

46:17SPEAKERThey're new enough and big enough that like gigabits too slow. Yeah, sure

46:21SPEAKERAnd I'll whip through the rest of this really quickly, but I lastly I have a sort like a big sort

46:27SPEAKERIt's called sort data set on my big bulk storage pool. That is basically kind of exactly what it sounds like

46:33SPEAKERIt's just like temp downloaded stuff

46:35SPEAKERIt's like I've grabbed from wherever that either you need to get sorted into one of those other places were deleted

46:40SPEAKERSo I use a tool called file bot to do that for me for me this stuff

46:44SPEAKERIt basically takes the tech looks at the tags that you put in when you upload stuff and then it will move it into your

46:50SPEAKERdirectory structure

46:52SPEAKERInteresting based on the rules you set and I use

46:55SPEAKERfor music, I don't really care cuz I don't rip a whole lot of CDs anymore, but

46:59SPEAKERFor movies and TV. I use the Plex structure that they advocate to make it easy to

47:05SPEAKERFor Plex to know what each thing is and you know, just be able to manage it

47:08SPEAKERYeah

47:09SPEAKERI mean

47:10SPEAKERLike I said, ideally the purpose of sorts is for me to either go go through it and move things to a permanent location or delete

47:16SPEAKERThem. Mm-hmm. Guess what's actually the biggest data set on the server sort is guess what never actually gets sorted

47:23SPEAKERAnything? Uh-huh. Guess what's easier than spending weeks sorting a bunch of old stuff?

47:29SPEAKERYou should get a kid if you get a kid. This could be a job for them buying old buying more hard drives

47:33SPEAKERYeah, it turns out turns out 300 bucks for a hard drive relatively cheap compared to not having free time

47:39SPEAKERyes, and then the last the last kind of storage thing in the NAS worth talking about is I have I have a

47:45SPEAKERMirrored NVMe drive in there, right? I mean, it's two NVMe drives mirrored though. So it's the space of one

47:50SPEAKEROkay

47:52SPEAKERThat is that's I call it scratch because that is like literal actual scratch space

47:55SPEAKERso like I use that for I mean, I use that volume for all kinds of stuff that's not even just files, but

48:00SPEAKERfrom a storage standpoint I use it for things like

48:03SPEAKERFor example, let's say I grabbed late an archive of Saturn games from archive.org or something

48:09SPEAKERYou know, you know, I mean like we do a lot of mr. Stuff on streams. Yeah forth

48:13SPEAKERThe that really fast storage is very useful for like if I want to do like a bulk decompress of everything

48:19SPEAKERThat I just like if I've got however, you know several hundred

48:24SPEAKERSaturn games

48:25SPEAKERIt's nice to be able to it's nice to be able to read them from one drive, but write them to another, you know

48:31SPEAKERSo you're not reading from and writing back to the same drive which could slow down the decompression

48:35SPEAKERLike I just want it to be done as fast as possible. So it's nice to it's nice to have a really fast

48:41SPEAKERRelatively big but not super big because it's NVMe but big enough

48:45SPEAKERPlace to just very rapidly dump this stuff like like yeah, you know, like I'm reading all these archive files from the hard drives

48:52SPEAKERBut instead of having to write them back to the hard drives, I can have them decompress to a faster drive

48:57SPEAKERWhich just gets it done quicker

48:58SPEAKERI also use that volume for like all my OBS recordings go there because I just want

49:03SPEAKERSomething with no seat time and very fast throughput. I can't believe you save OBS recordings live to the nest

49:09SPEAKERThat seems really high risk to me. It's I've never had a problem

49:13SPEAKERI mean, I guess your NAS is like three feet away and your project plug directly into it. That's exactly it

49:19SPEAKERYeah, but I don't I don't want to be recording guy

49:22SPEAKERI write because I archive OBS recordings on a very high bit rate and I don't want to be

49:26SPEAKERDealing with seat times on hard drives or anything. So those just go straight toes SSDs. I guess that makes sense

49:31SPEAKERthe other thing I realized I have on my nest that I forgot to talk about is I have a

49:34SPEAKERmy Plex data folder the one that the basically it's like the

49:40SPEAKERuser like wearing

49:43SPEAKERLike the library like the Plex library. Yeah, like the library metadata cache

49:47SPEAKERImages all that stuff is a separate is a separate share on my NAS

49:51SPEAKERIt's basically the database that gets generated as you add stuff to Plex and like yeah match match

49:57SPEAKERAnd sort things and stuff

49:59SPEAKERSo that's that's the other use of this of this NVB volume is that all of my containers and services run from there?

50:07SPEAKERThey're all stored on there. So oh, so that's where like my Plex and jellyfin and own tone, which is that music server?

50:12SPEAKERI run and some other stuff like that those all live there

50:15SPEAKERAnd then again the idea there is I just want the I want the access times to be as fast as possible for anything that

50:20SPEAKERI'm accessing from other devices. So like, you know, I'm doing Plex or

50:25SPEAKERMy music library or something from phone or a laptop or whatever you just I want all that stuff to populate or enumerate as fast

50:31SPEAKERAs it can so I want all the database stuff to be running from very fast storage

50:34SPEAKERThat makes sense. Yeah, it all makes sense. So

50:37SPEAKERthat's that's all more like top-level kind of how we've got our drives and stuff laid out like

50:42SPEAKERTo the actual question. How do you organize your files from a folder structure and schema standpoint?

50:48SPEAKERLike I said, I wish I had a more unified like sensible answer here

50:52SPEAKERBut like like you were saying the media folder does get a fair amount of attention

50:57SPEAKERWell, the old the old hard drives dump gets none

51:01SPEAKERSo that I actually think it's kind of funny to look at how ramshackle it is. So my D Drive is pretty pretty well structured

51:07SPEAKERRight, like I have top-level

51:09SPEAKERso he depend depending it

51:13SPEAKERBasically, my thought is top-level folders are for whether stuff gets backed up or whether stuff doesn't get backed up, right? So

51:21SPEAKERAnything like all like you said all of the games from all the different stores all go into one folder that I can just tell

51:27SPEAKERWhatever backup tool I use to ignore. Yeah

51:30SPEAKERPretty much the rest of it gets backed up because it's the rest of its important

51:33SPEAKERI'm actually I'm gonna stop you because of the thing that what you just said is like a probably a great way to repurchase the stuff

51:38SPEAKERParticularly if you're backing things up, which you should be yeah

51:41SPEAKERLike maybe a good way to look at it is always organize things in a way that you can exclude things from a future operation

51:48SPEAKERif if necessary like make things make things compartmentalized enough that you can

51:53SPEAKERSay I want to include this type and exclude this type like always always have like clear separation

51:59SPEAKERSuch that you can keep or discard specific categories of thing. Yeah, and it's and it's it's like so in that regard

52:06SPEAKERIt's I find it's helpful to have

52:09SPEAKERprojects that are like so my subfolders for example, my video folder has

52:14SPEAKERSubfolders for

52:16SPEAKERprojects that are ongoing and then there's an archive for the

52:21SPEAKERFinished archived project that I dump in there and most of the time I don't keep those like most of those are I don't need

52:27SPEAKERto keep so like for example in there right now

52:30SPEAKERthere's some PC world videos that I did at CES that are like the premiere project the finished output video and

52:35SPEAKERI should just delete those because they're posted on YouTube. I don't need them anymore. They don't want them they can go away

52:43SPEAKERThat's all being backed up currently the other thing that I don't do that

52:46SPEAKERI probably should is that some stuff I want and I want to keep backed up

52:50SPEAKERbut it doesn't need to be backed up every day like

52:53SPEAKERArguably, my backup software is handling this automatically. We'll talk about that in a little bit

52:57SPEAKERBut like I don't need to make hourly backups of my perforce folder perforce does that right?

53:02SPEAKERI just want to make sure I have a copy of

53:05SPEAKERProjects I've worked on that may not like I may not be connected to the perforce server anymore stuff like that

53:12SPEAKERThe

53:14SPEAKERLet's see video video

53:16SPEAKERyeah, the rest of it is like pretty straightforward like the consulting folder is just

53:21SPEAKERcontracts and stuff like that for people I work with

53:24SPEAKERand and like documents that

53:27SPEAKERSo for example, if I'm working on a consulting job and somebody's like, oh, hey

53:31SPEAKERYou need you need to be able to give us all the work all of your notes and stuff like that on this

53:34SPEAKERI want to have a place to store all of the stuff so I can just say here's the folder with everything of yours

53:39SPEAKERThat you've paid me to work on during this time. Thank you. Thank you so much

53:43SPEAKERand a lot of my structure is is based on that and then the last one is like

53:49SPEAKERThe all the rest which is like small stuff. That's like inconsequential when

53:54SPEAKERConfronted with the scale of the storage on the NAS where everything gets backed up to

53:58SPEAKERSo I just don't worry about it and back it up

54:00SPEAKERYou know what?

54:01SPEAKERI mean, so like laser cutting projects are all like tiny vector files and like there's a here's the thing

54:07SPEAKERI worked on the entire folder is

54:10SPEAKER2.05 megabytes, but that 2.05 megabytes represents probably 20 hours of work, right?

54:15SPEAKERAnd I and so that's incredibly important that gets backed up a lot of that stuff

54:19SPEAKERI also just copy into a folder on Dropbox. It's like 2 to 2 megs on Dropbox. Who cares? That's that's a good

54:26SPEAKEROf course, that's that's the three to one philosophy, right?

54:29SPEAKERBut that is good thing to point out is the you know, yeah three backups to local one remote

54:34SPEAKERBut I do the same thing where like I dumped all the you know, we've talked about it a bunch

54:38SPEAKERI dumped all the saves for my old cartridges

54:40SPEAKERMm-hmm, and I've got those on my NAS but I've also they're small like just like just like your vector stuff

54:45SPEAKERLike yeah, they're like 50k probably, right?

54:47SPEAKERThose are so small and so important that they also are on my Dropbox and maybe also on my OneDrive like making

54:53SPEAKERYeah, I'm making very sure I don't lose those files. Yeah, that's that's that's really cool

54:59SPEAKERso yeah, and then

55:01SPEAKERLet's just you want to just do like a high-level pass on backups

55:04SPEAKERYeah, I'll let you take most of this because as is well documented

55:08SPEAKERI bought like hardware hardware to forward down the hall backup strategy like couple years ago. I still have yet to set up

55:15SPEAKERso I'd

55:17SPEAKERI've got a scheme in mind that I've never implemented but I'm curious to hear what you do

55:20SPEAKERI understand why you don't do it because it's fraught and and Microsoft's shift to services has made this worse

55:27SPEAKERSo in the old days Microsoft shift shipped this thing called Windows backup that came with the Windows 7 and newer

55:32SPEAKERthat was a really competent image plus incremental backup software and

55:38SPEAKERSince Windows 11 came out. They've increasingly buried it with each update. I thought it was gone

55:44SPEAKERBut in the process of doing this episode, I found it again, which was really nice

55:49SPEAKERBecause it's my favorite way to back up like it's installed on every Windows machine

55:52SPEAKERit's really easy to use if you have a net like

55:56SPEAKERtwo steps I

55:58SPEAKERdon't like OneDrive for backing up my own stuff because I have I work with really large files and it's and

56:04SPEAKERAlso the way OneDrive backs stuff up automatically doesn't work for me because I don't keep everything in my profile folder

56:10SPEAKERRight OneDrive by default isn't gonna back up my D drive, which is where all of my important stuff lives

56:17SPEAKERSo I always turn it off if you're if you're helping your family members if you're helping people who are non-technical and

56:24SPEAKERWho mostly just work with small files and do like their taxes and stuff on their computer?

56:30SPEAKERAnd you're paying for office already. So you have some OneDrive storage OneDrive is great

56:35SPEAKERFantastic. It syncs up everything across all your computers, which is weird and frustrating sometimes but

56:40SPEAKERHaving your laptop backed up so that if you drop your laptop in a lake or somebody steals it or something is incredibly valuable

56:46SPEAKERSo like if you're setting computers up for friends and family

56:50SPEAKERAbsolutely, leave it on and and just teach them about the limitations of it

56:54SPEAKERIf you are like us and have more specialized tasks Windows backup was a really good solution for a long time

57:02SPEAKERI just set it back up on this machine since I reinstalled last April and

57:08SPEAKERIt's it to find it you open the old control panel you search for file history and it's at the bottom

57:15SPEAKERIt says right on my notes, but I think it's on the bottom left actually

57:19SPEAKERit's on the bottom left of the page and

57:22SPEAKERIt's called system image backup

57:24SPEAKERAnd what that does is it lets you create a VHD of your C drive and then you can do incremental backs up backups off of

57:32SPEAKERthere and it'll either use a blank hard drive that's plugged into your computer if you have like a USB external drive or if you

57:37SPEAKERHave a NAS you can point it to a network share with the appropriate permissions. Okay, great

57:41SPEAKERAnd and that works quite well

57:45SPEAKERnow I

57:47SPEAKERDon't know how long it's gonna last

57:49SPEAKERLike it's entirely possible that they're gonna

57:52SPEAKERDeprecate it at some point in the future. It may already be on the list

57:55SPEAKERI couldn't find anything that said that but like if Microsoft sites are kind of hard to navigate these days

58:00SPEAKERI mean I've lost count of how many different times somebody has claimed the control panel is definitely going away in the next version of

58:05SPEAKERWindows no for real this time and then it doesn't well, so the weird thing is the next thing I'm gonna talk about is

58:12SPEAKERactually, oh, so the restore process for this is that you save you you

58:16SPEAKERReinstall windows and you or use the windows recovery tools that are on your on your C drive

58:23SPEAKERYou point them at that ISO and then you connect the the restore application

58:28SPEAKERFrom the reinstalled version of Windows to that and it pulls all your files back down from note from the backups

58:32SPEAKERHave you have you ever actually had to do before I have done that before?

58:35SPEAKERYes, visit is it is the result pretty clean like is it it was as if it was identical for all intents and purposes

58:42SPEAKERThere's some limitations cuz like it doesn't resize

58:45SPEAKERThe ISO like you put in a new bigger hard drive or SSD or hard drive or whatever

58:50SPEAKERIt won't size up or down. So like, you know, it's mean it's it's for restoring to the same machine or an equivalent machine

58:57SPEAKERYeah, and then you can resize from there, right?

58:59SPEAKERNot not that hard to resize to it learn it's not that hard to enlarge age partition

59:03SPEAKERI should say like shrinking one is a little more fraught, but it's at least doable

59:07SPEAKERThe only time I've had problems is when I went from to one terabyte hard drive to another or one terabyte SSD to another one

59:12SPEAKERTerabyte SSD and one was like 50 megabytes bigger than the other. Yeah, just because of the way SSDs work anyway

59:20SPEAKERSo Windows file history is super weird because Windows file history is they used to be used to be shit called shadow volume copies

59:26SPEAKERAnd it works a lot like ZFS does where it saves different copies of the same file through time on a regular schedule

59:34SPEAKERSo can Windows do that natively on NTFS now Windows has been able to do that since like Windows 7 on NTFS Wow

59:43SPEAKERIt's it's

59:45SPEAKERSorry, that's libraries

59:47SPEAKERIt may not maybe use Windows 10 for the file history

59:49SPEAKERBut the point is it basically you have to point it to another drive or a network share again

59:53SPEAKERAnd it saves those incremental changes on whatever cadence you want. You can do anywhere from like I'm looking at the schedule right now

1:00:02SPEAKERYou can do everything for every hour

1:00:03SPEAKERWhich is the default to like daily or I think dailies as fast as good every 10 minutes if you want

1:00:09SPEAKERThat's wild. I had no idea when those had that sort of thing just built in

1:00:13SPEAKERWell, so it makes sense given that it's a corporate operating system - sure

1:00:18SPEAKERBut it's not on by default. There's a little bit of performance overhead for it

1:00:21SPEAKERIt's pretty light especially if you do like hourly or semi like twice a day or once a day or something like that

1:00:27SPEAKERWhich is fine for most people. I mean, of course, you're you're going to be giving up any

1:00:32SPEAKERLike duplicated data is going to just eat that much extra space until you delete it

1:00:36SPEAKERYou know, like if you've got if you've got five versions of a file five distinct versions of a file

1:00:41SPEAKERThen you're going to have the footprint of all five of those files until you know

1:00:44SPEAKERYou can't magically just kind of store data without assuming the space. Yeah

1:00:48SPEAKERNo, until you purge those old versions and it's not doing anything clever like keeping diffs or something like that

1:00:53SPEAKERIt's doing it like the old-fashioned way

1:00:55SPEAKERSo I'm looking at the control panel right now and mine just says, you know file history is off and it's dark

1:01:00SPEAKERBut if you've got it turned on does it give you any insight into like hey

1:01:03SPEAKERHere's how much space your redundant kind of old versions are taking up

1:01:07SPEAKERLike does it give you any ability to like purge by time or anything like that? Yes, so you can you can clean

1:01:14SPEAKERYou can clean old stuff. So when you do the advanced settings you can say keep stuff until

1:01:20SPEAKERForever, which is the default which is an interesting choice

1:01:23SPEAKEROr you can do until space is needed or a month or three months or six months or nine months or a year or whatever

1:01:28SPEAKERI guess it I guess it seems smart to have a dynamic option in there to have it just call stuff the oldest stuff as

1:01:34SPEAKERSpace is required. Although I mean it could if you forget to check for long enough

1:01:38SPEAKERI guess they could get risky if it pulls something you decide you wanted later

1:01:41SPEAKERWell, so my understanding is it keeps the latest version of the file

1:01:46SPEAKEREven if it's older than the culling period so you're just losing the older version. That's right

1:01:51SPEAKERYeah, I just I just mean you might find they're like, oh I needed a different version of that document from two weeks ago

1:01:57SPEAKERI need to go get that and like oh it got cold. Yeah

1:01:59SPEAKERYeah, well so for the most part the stuff that I keep here is my profile folder

1:02:03SPEAKERSo by default it saves your profile folder and your libraries now

1:02:08SPEAKERMost people don't know what libraries are because they nobody used them. They were a Windows 7 feature

1:02:13SPEAKERI I don't know what they are. Yeah, they're basically meta folders. So you could you could say hey

1:02:19SPEAKERI I keep my music. I keep my mp3s in a folder on C

1:02:26SPEAKERIn and C users Brad music and then also I have a big folder on D

1:02:30SPEAKERThat's all my other fault my other music then I also have this network share. That's no I see that's that's

1:02:37SPEAKERMy in my in my slack. What was you call it slop folder? No sort sort. Yeah. Yeah in sort

1:02:43SPEAKERI keep there's music in there, too

1:02:44SPEAKERAnd you'll say take all the music for all three of these folders and put them in one

1:02:49SPEAKERThing that looks like a folder to applications like one meta folder. Yeah, it's a meta folder basically

1:02:55SPEAKERNobody used it because it didn't work very well

1:02:57SPEAKERBut it also backs up everything that's in there that are in your libraries now

1:03:03SPEAKERThey used to say hey, do you want to put any other folders in this in this in this file shadow volume copy stuff?

1:03:09SPEAKERand they took that feature away a while ago, but you can work around it by just making a new library and then adding the

1:03:15SPEAKERFolders that you want to get backed up into that library

1:03:18SPEAKERSo I have one that's just basically my D Drive and then I exclude things like the games folder

1:03:22SPEAKERAnd and a handful of other things that are just big right and unnecessary. So I

1:03:28SPEAKERhave currently I

1:03:31SPEAKERthink it's I I basically set up a network share that has three terabytes of

1:03:36SPEAKERmax maximum use of three terabytes and

1:03:40SPEAKERI have it's like one and a quarter terabytes

1:03:44SPEAKERUsed backing up my profile folder and the non excluded stuff on D

1:03:49SPEAKERIf that makes sense, yeah

1:03:52SPEAKERNow it's a little janky like this should not be your primary backup

1:03:56SPEAKERThis is a convenience feature for getting like pulling back an old version of something

1:04:01SPEAKERYou could also use an external drive for this too if you want or an internal drive if you have one in your machine

1:04:06SPEAKERIt took four tries. I think when I set this up on the new machine to get it to go

1:04:11SPEAKERLike like I had hits it does it automatically and it'll like this if you had it running every every hour

1:04:17SPEAKERThis would work itself out in four or five hours

1:04:19SPEAKERBecause I said it to do every day then it I had to keep hitting the button until I got everything but eventually it gets

1:04:24SPEAKEREverything and it's fine. I think if there's a network weather or if like

1:04:29SPEAKERYou know something hits your CPU hard or you reboot or whatever

1:04:33SPEAKERIt sometimes gets stalled out and then you end up with like not complete backups

1:04:39SPEAKERit does throw errors for any files that can't get so there's

1:04:42SPEAKERbecause of

1:04:43SPEAKERlike path links and stuff like that. Sometimes you'll end up with files with

1:04:49SPEAKERdeadspace is the one that always pops up my error logs because the

1:04:53SPEAKERdeadspace save files have a GUID that's like 25 characters long in the file name. Hmm

1:04:59SPEAKERAnd that puts them beyond the 256 character file limit for the Samba share that I use

1:05:06SPEAKERSo, you know your mileage may vary just pay just take a look at the log when you do the first couple of runs

1:05:11SPEAKERSure, make sure there's nothing that's that's not not getting done. Okay, and it's slow is the other thing that kind of stinks about it

1:05:18SPEAKERSo it kind of sounds like Windows backup is still maybe the best bet here except for the fact that it might go away

1:05:23SPEAKERSo I like the the one thing that's the benefit here is

1:05:28SPEAKERthat this if you want to restore a version of a file

1:05:32SPEAKERYou can do it from the properties for the folder or the properties from the file

1:05:35SPEAKERlike you can literally right-click on a folder file that's backed up and say oh I want the one of this from two weeks ago and

1:05:41SPEAKERClick on it and open it and copy it in the same folder

1:05:43SPEAKERIt'll have it like, you know, the date and the file name in the in the and it just works. It's really easy

1:05:50SPEAKERI I do worry that it's gonna go away

1:05:53SPEAKERAnd I think I'm probably gonna use this for like my daughter's computer is a perfect example of what this would be good for

1:05:59SPEAKERLike I don't need to keep image backups of her machine

1:06:02SPEAKERBecause mostly what she does is play games and do school stuff and both of those happen mostly online

1:06:07SPEAKERso

1:06:08SPEAKERSaving the things that she has created from her videos folder and her photos and all that kind of stuff

1:06:13SPEAKERMakes a lot of sense and this is a pretty lightweight way to do that. Okay

1:06:18SPEAKERIt doesn't protect you from ransomware is the other thing it sets a concern

1:06:22SPEAKERAnd then the the last thing is I tested a couple of standalone backup software solutions

1:06:27SPEAKERIs us Windows backup freeware is what was recommended by PC world as the best free thing. That's not the Microsoft one. Okay

1:06:35SPEAKERIt's easy there. I do see their name come up quite a bit in Google searches and stuff

1:06:39SPEAKERYeah, it was it. I was pleasantly surprised by it the probably I would pay

1:06:45SPEAKERIf I was going to use this I would pay them think it's I think it was 80 bucks for a lifetime license

1:06:52SPEAKERMSRP and as soon as I clicked into the page it was like hey, do you want this for 60 bucks?

1:06:56SPEAKERWe'll give you some money off if you want to give us money right now

1:07:01SPEAKERJust because it doesn't let the the free version doesn't let you say hey don't you can you can back up drives

1:07:08SPEAKERBut you can't exclude folders on those drives. So

1:07:12SPEAKERThe amount of storage space backing up my steam folder would take is going to completely

1:07:18SPEAKERbe cancelled out by the cost of

1:07:21SPEAKERThe 60 bucks to buy the software if I was going to use this instead of Windows backup, for example. Yeah. Yeah

1:07:27SPEAKERAlso real quick. I mean you don't really use a Mac at all these days

1:07:30SPEAKERI have a MacBook, but I mostly use it when I'm traveling. I'm an IT admin for a Mac

1:07:35SPEAKERMy wife is a Mac user and there I mean, I do use my MacBook around the house off and on

1:07:40SPEAKERBut I'm guessing time machine is still probably the go-to

1:07:44SPEAKERYeah, time machine is great. And you can be you in order to use it. You have to set up a special share on your NAS

1:07:50SPEAKERyeah, that's one of

1:07:52SPEAKEROne of my endless projects that I've got, you know of things to set up on my server and stuff is you have to do

1:07:57SPEAKERSome specific magic to make a time machine backup work right to a Samba share and I've never gotten around to doing that

1:08:05SPEAKERThe real solution is to just set up an AFP share and then it just works Oh if he's been deprecated actually

1:08:11SPEAKERI think it's an FS. Maybe I can't remember. I'm pretty sure even Apple says not to use AFP anymore

1:08:16SPEAKERSo I did I did that when I back when I was a Mac user in the 2010s

1:08:21SPEAKERI set that up and did that on the nest I heard machines backing up to our nest now

1:08:26SPEAKERAnd I don't know that I did anything special to it

1:08:28SPEAKERYeah, we usually use it as to be clear if you're still using AFP. I believe that's actually it looks like oh

1:08:35SPEAKEROkay, actually as of Big Sur they know as a big server the Apple no longer supports AFP servers

1:08:41SPEAKERI'm not sure if that means they literally don't work anymore or they're just not getting updates or what but anyway

1:08:47SPEAKERso

1:08:48SPEAKERwhen I set this up for her since I'm on a Synology, I just

1:08:53SPEAKERflipped a switch

1:08:55SPEAKERthat said

1:08:57SPEAKERSet time machine folders, but okay

1:08:59SPEAKERYes

1:08:59SPEAKERI mean

1:09:00SPEAKERYou know here here is a here's a nice example of like Synology does the work for you to make a time machine backup work

1:09:05SPEAKEROver the network where I'm gonna have to go

1:09:08SPEAKERJump through numerous hoops. Yeah with my good old SMB conf to get that working

1:09:13SPEAKERI had to enable and enable Bonjour time machine broadcast via SMB

1:09:18SPEAKERYeah, apparently is what I did

1:09:20SPEAKERbut I was just backed up it's stuff like that and it's small it like it's it's like the size of her SSD of her used

1:09:26SPEAKERSpace plus like 20% or something because it calls stuff as it's been used. Yeah, I'll say really quick

1:09:33SPEAKERI know we've sort of talked about this before but my by my

1:09:36SPEAKERNAS backup over the network to a backup NAS scheme is it's literally just a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive enclosure

1:09:43SPEAKERWith enough stripes discs in it to fit

1:09:46SPEAKERYou know, whatever's on the NAS

1:09:48SPEAKERthe

1:09:50SPEAKERThe general idea is and I used to do this ages ago when I had a couple of just USB drives plugged into a true

1:09:56SPEAKERNAS machine before things got more complicated here

1:09:59SPEAKERBut the idea is for the NAS to have a an automated nightly backup to that backup NAS down the hall

1:10:04SPEAKERYeah, and everything else gets back up to the main NAS

1:10:06SPEAKERSo like if I were doing Windows backups and time machine

1:10:10SPEAKERwhich I should be of my client computers goes back up to the main server and then the server backs up to a backup NAS and

1:10:16SPEAKERYeah, cascading backups. Yes. That's exactly it. It's like everything and it's just like, you know

1:10:21SPEAKERHow my you know, my mister like all my save games are mounted on the NAS for example

1:10:25SPEAKERSo like the more stuff gets stored on this main server

1:10:28SPEAKERIf that server is backing itself up to something else then that just means everything gets caught up in those backups

1:10:33SPEAKERwhich kind of the general philosophy which

1:10:36SPEAKERAgain, if I ever got around to implementing it would probably work pretty well

1:10:39SPEAKERBut well, so the thing I'll say is having having started this process a couple months ago

1:10:46SPEAKERIt it actually wasn't it was more of a hassle to find out what was good and what wasn't than it was to actually turn

1:10:52SPEAKERIt on the file history thing took about 10 minutes to set up

1:10:56SPEAKERThe Windows backup took a little bit more than that and the first run was longer

1:11:00SPEAKERI'm a little worried because I really don't leave my computer on when I'm not using it anymore

1:11:03SPEAKERSo I'm worried about when those backups are actually gonna happen

1:11:06SPEAKEROh, I didn't actually think to ask about that is does all these windows

1:11:09SPEAKERI mean the file history definitely happens seamlessly but stuff like Windows backup

1:11:13SPEAKERIs that something you have to trigger and then watch a progress bar or does it do it in the background?

1:11:17SPEAKERDoes it in the background for the incremental backups and it'll occasionally throw up an error for files locked if I recall

1:11:22SPEAKERBut I haven't had that happen in a long time

1:11:25SPEAKERBut I also like I said, I used to leave my computer on all night now I don't anymore so I don't know it's um

1:11:32SPEAKERFor me, like I don't want to lose

1:11:36SPEAKERIt depends on what most of the work that I'm doing that if I lost would cause me financial or physical harm

1:11:43SPEAKERsaved

1:11:44SPEAKERLike it lives in a notion database or or on a Dropbox server or something like that somewhere

1:11:50SPEAKERSo like if this machine goes down the the the problem is runtime is time lost not work lost

1:11:56SPEAKERYes, I think we should probably stress that like no matter

1:12:00SPEAKERNo matter how robust or redundant or bespoke your kind of personal backup strategy is, you know

1:12:05SPEAKEREven like including the things we have described here with you know

1:12:08SPEAKERRaspberry Pi is down the hall and everything like never I would never ever count on that as a an end-all be-all if we're talking about

1:12:16SPEAKERirreplaceable stuff like family photos or birth certificates or tax records that are super important like anything that's like truly truly like encryption keys for

1:12:23SPEAKEREncrypted drives like anything that is truly irreplaceable. You should I don't know

1:12:29SPEAKERbuy some extra external hard drives and make duplicate copies of that stuff or or

1:12:34SPEAKERPut them in Dropbox, you know put them in commercial services as well. Like I like I

1:12:38SPEAKERGuess what I'm saying is like no matter how robust your home backup setup is if it's like something you absolutely would die to lose

1:12:45SPEAKERYeah, like you should still still replicate that somewhere else than outside of your house. Yes. Yes very much

1:12:51SPEAKERthe

1:12:53SPEAKERthe and then the other thing the other disclaimer that we always I always feel like we have to put here because

1:12:57SPEAKERpeople often conflate these things we've talked about this before but

1:13:02SPEAKERBackups and redundancy on drives and NASA's and all that stuff are not the same thing on something

1:13:08SPEAKEREspecially especially in the era of ransomware. It's it's more even more important now than it ever has been before

1:13:15SPEAKERbecause

1:13:17SPEAKERyou know the the backup will

1:13:19SPEAKERThe backup will save you when somebody takes over your your entire system and encrypts everything

1:13:24SPEAKERYeah

1:13:25SPEAKERbut only if it's not connected to the machine when you do it right if

1:13:28SPEAKERif everything that your machine can access is encrypted then you're starting from scratch just like

1:13:34SPEAKERLike the Seattle Public Library did last year or year before now, I guess

1:13:37SPEAKERYeah, like really raid is not backup is one way that you'll hear that put yes

1:13:41SPEAKERYou know, like it's not enough to have like mirror drives in one computer, you know

1:13:45SPEAKERCuz even you know, if one of those hard drives fails, the other one is fine

1:13:47SPEAKERBut what happens if that computer catches on fire, you know or but more importantly what like what happens if you get infected with the virus?

1:13:53SPEAKERit starts deleting stuff right or then the mirror is just gonna mindlessly to replicate the deletions right and it's just like look at look at

1:14:00SPEAKERThe units of failure, you know, it's like there are two drives in one computer, but there's only one computer

1:14:03SPEAKERSo you've got to have it some you've got to have a backup outside of that computer because that one

1:14:08SPEAKEROne catastrophic event can take down the entire machine the other the last option I didn't talk about here

1:14:13SPEAKERI don't use them as much anymore these days

1:14:17SPEAKERBut back plays I've used back plays off and on for years and is is very good

1:14:22SPEAKERThey are like it's a reasonable price for an annual single computer

1:14:27SPEAKERBackup subscription for like a desktop computer. Yes, they will not it gets a lot for near if you're backing up like I think the way they

1:14:36SPEAKERdistinguish it is like they basically look at what operating system and what type of storage you're backing up from so like

1:14:41SPEAKERLike a Windows machine or a Mac you can back up like a flat rate unlimited data for like you said pretty reasonable

1:14:46SPEAKERIf you have something if it's something that they detect that it's Linux or it's a network share or it's like a server

1:14:52SPEAKERAnd ask quote unquote, then you start paying by the terabyte and that gets way pricier. So

1:14:57SPEAKERYeah, they're their annual pricing for personal backup of a single machine is 99 bucks a year

1:15:03SPEAKERYeah, which is that's totally reasonable for a like a client computer

1:15:08SPEAKERYeah

1:15:08SPEAKERyou'll spend more than that on hard drives if you're if you're if this if this is your

1:15:13SPEAKERif this is if if you don't want to have to worry about any of this stuff just

1:15:17SPEAKERwrite back plays an annual check and

1:15:19SPEAKERLike you're gonna be it's a it's a good solution

1:15:24SPEAKERIn the old days back before NASA's got popular and inexpensive

1:15:29SPEAKERrack

1:15:31SPEAKERWhat was the other one not back plays something else plays? Oh

1:15:35SPEAKERWhen the source with the sea, I can't believe I've forgotten this already cloud. No, not cloud. It doesn't matter

1:15:39SPEAKERAnyway, one of their competitors used to offer NAS backups

1:15:44SPEAKERThat you could plug into like free NAS or true NAS as a plug-in and it was basically the same price

1:15:50SPEAKERAnd you could back up whatever you wanted

1:15:52SPEAKERThey stopped everybody stopped doing that because it turns out it was not cost effective for them. Yeah

1:15:59SPEAKERAnd the restores for back plays range from you can download stuff a certain amount of things a month

1:16:05SPEAKERI think or if you have a catastrophic failure, they'll just send you a hard drive

1:16:09SPEAKERThen you send the hard drive back when you've restored it, right?

1:16:11SPEAKERKeep the hard drive if you want to buy the hard drive from them. Yep. Yep, so

1:16:16SPEAKERSo anyway, that's backups. That's data structure. I hope that answers the question

1:16:21SPEAKERLike it was incredibly if nothing else

1:16:24SPEAKERI would say it was really helpful for me to think about this because I haven't I haven't actually taken a look at how my

1:16:30SPEAKERStuff is backed up and with the kiddos like the kiddo has a laptop that she uses for school and her desktop that she uses

1:16:36SPEAKERfor games

1:16:37SPEAKERMy wife's Mac and all the other stuff in the house

1:16:39SPEAKERIt was worth kind of useful to take an audit and think about how all this works together

1:16:43SPEAKERYeah, for sure. It's a lot to keep in your head if you've got multiple machines and different network shares and all kinds of different

1:16:49SPEAKERStorage buckets. Yeah, I think I think my next thing I think I'm gonna get a big giant

1:16:55SPEAKERlike single disk

1:16:57SPEAKERdrive to put in my NAS because I have a couple more slots and I think I'm gonna put that in and I'm gonna use

1:17:02SPEAKERIt just to hold the backups and then I can keep like this because one of the things if you're doing the the time machine

1:17:09SPEAKEROr the Windows file history stuff you need to limit the amount of space that it has or it'll fill up everything on your NAS

1:17:14SPEAKERover time, right

1:17:17SPEAKERLike if I put a 20 gig 20 terabyte hard drive in there

1:17:20SPEAKERThen we get a infinite backups as long as that drive lasts and like I said before you don't need redundancy

1:17:26SPEAKERI don't I don't feel like I need redundancy on backups because they're already they're inherently redundant

1:17:31SPEAKERYeah, so anyway fill the slots fill the slots. Yeah got room for more drives put more drives in there

1:17:37SPEAKERWell, each one costs a little bit of money every month

1:17:39SPEAKERSo anyway, I guess that that that I think will do it for us this this week. Thanks everybody

1:17:45SPEAKERFor listening as always brand will made a tech pot is a listener supported show

1:17:51SPEAKERSo that means without you all here the listeners we would not we would not there's nothing like it would just be two guys talking in

1:17:56SPEAKERThe microphones, that's right. That's right, but we wouldn't be recording it

1:17:59SPEAKERNo, we just be hanging out and we're editing it or putting it out on the internet for people to listen to

1:18:03SPEAKERMy Linux project has started. Okay. Yes your Linux continues. Mm-hmm. Thanks Microsoft

1:18:09SPEAKERI was thinking about digging into that stuff this weekend

1:18:12SPEAKERI know I keep saying that but now that we've gone through this now I'm thinking like I should really work on the backup stuff

1:18:16SPEAKERThat's actually like mission critical the backup stuff. Like I feel better having the backup stuff under control. Yes. Yes

1:18:23SPEAKERYes, like not having Linux distros to play with on your workstation or your gaming PC is like kind of whatever

1:18:29SPEAKERNot having a backup solution in place is like something that will gnaw at you. It'll kind of eat away

1:18:33SPEAKERIt's like man really kind of like flying by the seat of my pants here

1:18:37SPEAKERbut but at the same time like we should we should cover more desktop Linux in the near future and I need to

1:18:43SPEAKERDo some more tinkering with that stuff myself so we can do that. Yeah, it's it's um, we're talking about doing a PC world, too

1:18:49SPEAKERSo there's there's like there's there's movement

1:18:52SPEAKERthere's movement of fun I was gonna say like if the PC world is getting into desktop Linux and gaming coverage then I feel like

1:18:59SPEAKER2025 might actually be the year. Well, we talked about it

1:19:02SPEAKERI mean look I have been screaming year of Linux ever since Microsoft announced they were killing Windows Windows 10 at the end of this

1:19:09SPEAKERyear, so

1:19:10SPEAKERbut but like

1:19:12SPEAKERThere's it's funny when we talked about on the patron episode last week

1:19:15SPEAKERwhich you can get to by going to patreon.com slash tech bot and paying us five dollars a month to

1:19:20SPEAKERBecome a patron of the show which also grants you access to the discord

1:19:24SPEAKERPeople in the discord started sharing a bunch of videos from otherwise normal looking people who were like, hey

1:19:28SPEAKERI'm trying Linux on the desktop because fuck windows. Yeah, okay. I have been

1:19:33SPEAKERI've been too afraid to look at the thread for that patron episode yet cuz I'm afraid of

1:19:38SPEAKERPeople generally quite liked it. I'm afraid whether my rambling about wind butter FS and signing Windows kernel drivers

1:19:44SPEAKERputs people off but

1:19:46SPEAKERSomeone also shared. Let's see. Who was it? I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure I get it Hannibal 127

1:19:53SPEAKERShared the link to the thing that lets you mount Windows dynamic disks and Linux. Oh as well

1:19:57SPEAKEROkay, I'll take a look at that then

1:19:59SPEAKERyeah, but but the point is if I need to get in there if I would love to see some videos of like

1:20:03SPEAKERUnassuming everyday normal people talking about trying Linux for the first time

1:20:08SPEAKERYeah, it's it's I mean

1:20:09SPEAKERSo I installed a cover one distro last week and messed up my boot stuff and had to do some work on that

1:20:16SPEAKERBut it's been interesting getting into it

1:20:18SPEAKERWe'll talk about more on future episodes

1:20:19SPEAKERBut if you want to support the show if you want to support experimentation if you want to learn about windows

1:20:23SPEAKERThe desktop Linux are backing up windows

1:20:27SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com slash tech pod and sign up there. Hey good news. Also, I could use some good news. Sure

1:20:35SPEAKERWell, Tim epic

1:20:38SPEAKERBattle with Tim Apple. Yeah in the courts. Yeah, is that something we need to be looking at?

1:20:43SPEAKERProbably well, so I believe that that means you can buy a patreon app

1:20:50SPEAKERSubscription to the show and they don't charge you extra money anymore. I don't know if that's gone into effect yet

1:20:54SPEAKERI'd wish because there was a notice this morning that said it's going it's in effect. Yeah

1:20:58SPEAKERYeah, so good on patreon for like immediately dropping that Apple surcharge as soon as Apple was forced to pivot

1:21:04SPEAKERIt sounds like they were forced to change the judge. The judge was pissed by the court. Yeah, the judge was pissed now the

1:21:11SPEAKERNobody's abiding by core rulings anymore. Huh? Well, we haven't so well, that's a whole look

1:21:19SPEAKERThat's a problem it turns out

1:21:21SPEAKERSo we haven't flipped on the subscription. This means we don't have to change from the current pricing model

1:21:26SPEAKERIf we don't want to I believe also is the other thing. Oh, yeah, cuz they were gonna make some changes there

1:21:29SPEAKERYeah

1:21:30SPEAKERIt means like I have not changed up until this point because I didn't want to flip on

1:21:34SPEAKERI don't think you could actually buy our subscriptions on the app because we didn't switch to the new model

1:21:40SPEAKERI'll do some reading and find out what that is that should enable other things like gift subs and stuff like that

1:21:44SPEAKERPeople are into that because we have gotten a lot of questions about that over the years. So

1:21:49SPEAKERAnyway, thanks to everybody who supports the show if you'd like to find out how you can go to patreon.com slash check pot

1:21:53SPEAKERThis is the longest plug section we've ever done right now. It's like there's two asides in here

1:21:59SPEAKERWe're out of control, but it's time to thank our executive producer to your patrons including Jason Lee Andrew slosky Jordan

1:22:05SPEAKERLippitt bunny fiend for FIA president. I don't know what that means, but I'll endorse bunny fiend at this point

1:22:12SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie David Allen James kammok and pantheon makers of the HS 3 high-speed 3d 3d printer

1:22:18SPEAKERThank you also so much future imagine years of America said it. I don't know. I just made it

1:22:24SPEAKERI just made it up, but I'd like to think so

1:22:26SPEAKERYeah, I can't I can't think of anything that starts with a that's a thing. That might be the something this future something of America now

1:22:35SPEAKERBunny fiend, yeah, they're in there in their campaign

1:22:38SPEAKERTheir campaign ends well and their enemies are crushed beneath their boot heels. Yes. Yes, we can all only hope for that

1:22:44SPEAKERBut yes, thank you. Thank you everyone for your support and

1:22:48SPEAKERThat will do it for us this week as always please consider the environment for before printing this podcast. We'll see you next week