Category: Tech

Anything and everything I write that has something to do with tech. Maybe it’s a post about the time I blew up that server in 2003 because I didn’t know what bridged networking really meant. Sorry Roger!

Making a plan to reduce Digital Hoarding

I’ve been working in IT for more than 20 years now. There are many reasons why I have maintained a digital hoard of outdated executables and installers, but the time has come to make an effective plan for clearing out some debris. In this post I want to look at some of the various reasons maintaining a library has been helpful and necessary. I want to then identify a path forward to clear out all this digital rubbish. Creating a file management plan like this has applicability to all of us as individuals, as the digital debris we leave behind may become more overwhelming for our loved ones than physical possessions.  This topic has serious relevance to businesses, as clearly defined and documented retention policies are more likely to be followed. These retention policies are recommended as one method to reduce several different risks to businesses.

 

How this impacts me

As seen in this screenshot, keeping various versions of files is an easy activity to get carried away with.

List of outdated files

 

Some of the reasons I have kept files is very important to note, and there can be legitimate reasons to keep multiple versions handy. And this isn’t an issue when we are talking about small(ish) files like these nmap installers:

List of nmap installers with size and dates

But… this becomes a huge space consumer when we start looking into entire operating systems backed up as .ISOs, .IMGs, and .DMGs. Windows 7 became end of life on January 14, 2020 and Windows 8.1 will be EOL less than 5 months from this post on January 10, 2023. If I was to have to reinstall an OS on an old computer, I will never install Windows 7. The only reason I have kept these old .ISOs was to become nostalgic and take them for a spin in a VM. This is ridiculous, who has time for that? This size issue has become a huge burden since I started working with CyanogenMod and LineageOS for Androids. It is also a pain due to offline versions of iOS that I needed to maintain for some work functions a few years back.

List of Windows 7 installers with size details. More than 12GB of files

  • Often times developers will deprecate entire programs and do everything they can to pull access to this code. (Microsoft does this often!)
    • This leads to a situation where they only place to download a very useful program is some shady random website. And anyone with a bit of security knowledge understands that it’s trivial to wrap some malware around another executable.
      • For a while I was hosting an online and freely accessible “Toolbox” with installers in this same way. And then I realized I am really not helping this problem. If someone downloads something from my site and it’s clean, that same individual may think that it’s also OK to download something else from another random site. This is proliferating bad behavior, and I don’t want to be part of this any longer.
  • Some times a new version comes out and is incompatible with my current OS. Or a feature is deprecated or broken in a new version.
  • If work is going to be done offline and far away from an Internet connection, then having a giant toolbox is very helpful.
    • This was essential when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and common practice before people started tethering phones as hotspots.
  • The irrational fear that the Internet would be disrupted severely enough that I needed to hoard access as a means to fix computers in a world that was permanently offline.
    • As I’ve grown older, I realize that if this ever happened I have fear that society as a whole would suffer heavily. This means there is significant incentive and momentum in our country for this situation to not occur.
      • And therefore if it really did occur, fixing computers will not be a high priority for me.
        • It is this same argument that a lot of people, including myself, still own their physical CDs and DVDs, but subscribe to streaming services.

 

With some of those easy reasons out of the way, it’s not hard to imagine the proliferation of executables over the last several years.

My plan to excise some of this waste:

  1. Identify the two most recent versions of an executable or .ISO I have.
    1. In the case of an Operating System, if it is EOL it should be deleted.
  2. Delete everything older.
  3. When I download an updated version of something, delete the older version.

 

I have no reasonable way to guess the amount of time this will take. Also, I am not entirely sure whether as my colleague Jeff would say “is the juice worth the squeeze?” I am aware that my hoarding has now caused a sufficient lack of disk space on a rather expensive SSD, and it’s absurd for me to keep this junk any longer.

 

I wish you all luck. Digital hoarding may be both easier to start and clean up than physical hoarding. I am finding it is just as important to clean out your digital space as it is the physical. Buying a new hard drive just because you run out of space is the digital equivalent of people getting storage lockers because they run out of space in their house.

 

Closing

I want to come back and address this topic separately for its impact to YOU my reader, as well as to IT leaders that may find this relevant to their businesses.

The definition of “I will never do that…”

I am writing this while currently on a plane. Oh yes the joy of modern technology.

Also I will likely save this as a draft and publish it later. If you have read my serious work, you know I proofread, but this is not the reason I am drafting this.

It is because the connection is terrible. I am fondly remembering how I have waited 6 hours for a bus to leave when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I have traveled the US by Greyhound long before mobile phones and YouTube.

I am now in a scenario where my Kindle is out of reach, the streaming sucks, and I have no locally saved movies. Hmmm… this is surprisingly unusual.

Do you know what I could do? I could go through all the crap files I have on my phone and delete things I don’t need.

Seriously, I could. But I don’t want to. I am starting to think that I will never do this. Ever.

I paid for some great de-duplication software a few years back, and I have trimmed a lot of cruft. But that’s only culling based off metadata, particularly filehash comparison. That’s not me looking at content saying “yes! That is a keeper!”

What I am saying is I don’t care if I ever go through that. All that digital debris that is floating around? Let it float. I can’t fathom doing this.

Next time I think of my hoarding of good intentions, this is what will come to my mind. If I am stuck on a plane without WiFi, and no entertainment, I must ask myself, will I do some particular activity? If the answer is anything but a yes, I have added yet another thing to the pile of good intentions.

Catastrophe through impatience

I’ve tried really hard to learn over the years to stop myself from making mistakes due to impatience. The challenge is real, and it still continues to this day. I may average an event like this at least once a year, if not every 6-months or so.

A few days ago I desperately needed to access an old external HDD that required a power brick that I didn’t have any longer. I looked around but couldn’t find one, so I became frustrated. I figured that if I were to damage the drive, it could be in my best interest since that would prevent me from wasting more time should I actually get access. I would potentially be searching for a 1GB needle in a 3TB haystack using something as arduous as Testdisk. Maybe if the drive malfunctioned, I would save myself time?

It probably goes without saying that:

  1. I did something that I shouldn’t have done.
  2. I did something that I knew ran the risk of destroying the device.
  3. I did it anyways.
  4. I let all the smoke out of my HDD.

 

As exciting and utterly predictable as the outcome was, I was surprisingly undeterred. It turns out I could have bought the power supply for less than $5 on Amazon and waited a few more days.

Also undeterred, I decided to poke at the drive to find out what really went wrong. If nothing else I knew I had to dissect the drive to destroy the platters and claim the magnets. It was very exciting when I spotted something on the board that clearly cooked. I didn’t recognize what that part did, after all I’m not an electrical engineer, or even a skilled hobbyist. So I did what any self-taught fool would, and I searched Google for the part number on the device.

It turns out I am not the only person to make this stupid mistake with an external HDD. That’s cool.

 

And it turns out that the piece is a Transient Voltage Suppressor (TVS) diode. A very nice to have, but actually unnecessary piece to the HDD. The purpose of the TVS is to protect the remaining components of the system from a sustained over-voltage event. It may be oversimplification, but the TVS acts a lot like the old-school fuses that would blow in my mom’s ’74 Ford. The fix to my problem? Just remove the TVS! Removing the TVS permanently is not recommended, since the HDD now has no protection against a sustained over-voltage event. I’m grateful I have a fairly robust UPS that has a built-in line conditioner and should be cleaning up the voltage before it gets to the HDD. To be clear I will fix this, but not until I have found that file I am missing.

To make a long story short, I have caused myself significantly more work than I would have had I been patient and just bought the $5 adapter and waited. I know get the great opportunity to buy an $0.80 part to fix my old HDD. Why would I do this? A 3TB HDD is still respectable and is better fixed than discarded.

This post represents the first time I’m going to try and catalog my mistakes that are made through impatience. Since the time before this was when I melted a server, and the time before that was a catastrophic failure of a software component, I’m very curious what my next iteration will be. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed it will cause less work, also cost $0.80, and be entirely preventable if I stop and remember that it will take more time to fix than simply being patient and waiting for the mail.