285: More Free Space Than Free Time

Brad, I got some novelty chips the other day. Like semiconductor type chips? No, like Lays, basically. Wrong podcast, man. Wait, we have a food podcast? Wait, we do now. Oh, hell yeah. Uh, no, I got, I, so I was going to a barbecue last weekend for Easter 2.0. And, um, yeah, cause of the first weekend we had to, we talked about this in the patron episode, I think, but we had to delay.

Easter one week because some of the kids that participate in our Easter festivities were sick the weekend of. Right. And you had Easter too. We had Easter too. Easter harder. And I went to the grocery store and I made like I made like a, you know, a corn salad, you know, something, you know, a lotte salad like. like a, uh, esquites. I, you know, it's like cheese and corn and mayo and peppers and, you know, good stuff. And I made that.

And when I was at the grocery store getting stuff for that, I saw this new summer chips have dropped. Because Lay's every year now does like novelty flavors for the summer. It's the best and most wonderful time of the year. Yes. I mean, it's like we've moved out of candy season. Now we're into into barbecue season. So I bought a bag of honey barbecue lays, just plain chips. Wait, those were not the novelty ones, I hope. Those are novelty. Wait, really? Honey barbecue novelty flavor.

Yeah, it's like barbecue, but it's sweet. Sounds sure. But I mean, like as as like the wide and diverse range of potato chip flavors goes. That sounds a little pedestrian these days. Okay, look, it's not an all dressed. I like an all dressed. I like your ketchup. I like your sriracha flavored chips. But there are kids here. Dill pickle? Dill is a garden variety at this point, man. Sure.

But but so, yeah. OK, so the honey barbecue chips is just like barbecue potato chips. Sure. No, no change. Last year. Right. That's a little more. That was a nightmare. Wait, really? They were terrible. What? Really gross. Dude, I'm struggling to think of any situation that garlic does not improve on. I'm going to go and tell you it was not good. It was it was too like the. The balance of garlic to potato was punishing. So not what you wanted in favor of too much garlic, too much garlic.

That's impossible. It was it was not just too much garlic. It was really sharp. You know how like when you when you use a piece of garlic that has a little bit of green in it, it's maybe gone over and started to sprout. Sure. Yeah, it tasted like that. It was bad undercooked or something. It was undercooked or it wasn't like I like a sweet garlic. Right. I like to I like to taste the garlic. I want it to seep into my pores. This just made me.

Hurt. They're not trying anymore, it feels like. Because, I mean, you would get Thanksgiving stuffing flavored or turkey and gravy flavored potato chips in previous years. They're just... Well, there were there were like the food scientists. It's like it's like Taco Bell, right? Like Taco Bell. There's like four key ingredients. Yes. And that's really the problem here is that all these flavors are actually just a combination of laboratory chemicals.

Well, look, we're all a combination of laboratory chemicals at this point, but the Doritos, I'm going to go tell you stone cold bangers now. You and I know because we're old that Doritos started as a taco flavored chip. Yeah, like nacho. I think I think I remember when Cool Ranch came about. I think I remember a time when Doritos were just the nacho cheese flavor. Oh, no, this is a gap between our ages. Wait, really? Before there was a nacho cheese flavor of Dorito. Wait, what?

There was a taco flavored Dorito. What? They sell them occasionally as like a throwback thing. And it was like it was like chili powder flavored chips. It's the same chips. Triangles of corn. That instead of being nacho cheese flavored, which was an 80s invention, and then just they retconned away the taco flavored Dorito at that point. So the late night taco flavored Dorito is basically just like that taco flavored Dorito, but maybe a little bit more of a modern.

modern twist like there's a little bit of a hint of avocado on there or something because you only eat avocado after dark i mean when do you eat our avocado during the daytime Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. I 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, what do you call that? The rind? Skin. Rind? Shell? It seems too thick to be skin. Usk?

I think it's a skin. Isn't an avocado a seed? Oh, gosh. So that would be the shell, right? Well, wait, is it itself a seed or is it a fruit? Because it has a seed in it, right? It has a pit. I mean, I assume that's a seed. I think the pit is the... Hold on. Avocado. What was this? Anatomy. Sure.

Oh, this is going to be bad. This is an anatomy of the avocado fruit. There we go. It's a berry. It is a fruit. Okay, well, it's a fruit then. It's a big berry. You know why it's a berry? It's because stegosaurus ate them. And then pooped them out. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah, they're evolutionarily designed to be eaten by dinosaurs. Is that a real thing? That's a real thing. Yeah, no. Have prehistoric avocado fossils been discovered?

I don't know about that, but that's why I read that on the internet. So it's got to be true. Of course. Yes. Okay. The avocado fruit is a berry of one carpel containing a single seed. The mature Fuerte fruit is notably asymmetrical at the apex as a result of differential growth on opposite sides.

The pericarp. Yes. Is the store-bought avocado the thing that we typically consume? Is that the final form of the avocado or would it continue to? I mean, it turns into a tree eventually if you plant it. I guess so. Yeah. But I mean, like, is it pulled?

Is it pulled from the tree at the height of its development or does the fruit... continue to mature i guess is what i'm asking if it's a berry then the next step after ripeness would be falling off and rotting yeah fair on the ground probably right i don't know But I know that the pericarp consists of three layers, the exocarp, which comprises the skin or rind, the fleshy mesocarp, which is the edible portion of the fruit, and a thin inner layer next to the outer seed coat, the endocarp.

There you go. Welcome to the Avocast. Yeah, this is like now I want an avocado. OK, I'm just going. Yes, I want an avocado tree. I'm not sure that I will ever live in a climate that could support such a thing, but if I could have one fruiting tree in my entire life, it would be an avocado tree. If I could only have one. Okay. Absolutely. I mean, not least because avocados are kind of expensive.

Well, and they take, so we only buy avocados when they're cheap. So like we have, it's like the McRib for us, right? Like when the avocado prices get to a certain point, it's avocado to his time in the Smith household. Exactly. Same. What if you could just walk out into your yard anytime you wanted? Were you there when the avocado board sent us a couple of crates of avocados it tested? I think so.

We just like they they reached out to Norm and we're like, hey, we love we'd love to see what you guys test with a bunch of avocados. And we're like, OK, we'll take a bunch of avocados. We just ate a bunch of avocados, tested how many avocados you could eat. Yeah, it turns out all of them is the answer. Yeah. Yeah, it was a real race to get done before the box went bad. But I wonder how many avocados it would take before you started regretting your choices like a dozen, maybe.

Dude, I, I will, if you want sitting to be clear, Oh, one sitting like, like, like end to end, like finish one and start the next until you can't anymore. Like. Sounds like there's only one way to find this out, Brad. We're going to have to get the avocado board back on the phone. Next month's patron exclusive is just us eating avocados for three hours.

Especially after the tariffs kick in, that's going to be the only way to eat avocados. This is, I mean, this is like crabs though, right? Like I can sit down, you, you put me out in front of a bushel of blue crabs and all the thing that will break. Isn't my ability to eat crabs. It's eventually my fingers are too bloody and raw to pick more crabs. Nope. Yeah. So, and speaking of picking crabs, this week's episode is brought to you by a listener who had a question.

That was too substantial a question for our monthly Q&A episode. Unconventional. The first time we've ever done this, we have plucked a question from the Q&A that didn't get answered and turned it into a whole episode. It's the first time that we remembered who asked the question so we could credit them. So thanks to Streely Dan.

Who asked, how do you organize your files from a folder structure slash schema standpoint? I'm terrible at creating folder structures and as such have a mess of project folders, old desktop backups and document folders that should really be unified. It's a good question. It is. And so we're going to kind of take two approaches to this because the thing that came out of us talking about this a little bit, at least for me, was that. I do all of my desktop organization.

so that I can back stuff up easily. So that I have easy routes to back up for the data that's important to me. And so that I don't have to back up the enormous two terabyte games folder that's on my hard drive that I can just redownload from Steam if something happens to that drive. Sure. Um, I think let's, you want to start with file organization and like your file structure on, and.

Um, we separated these into like desktop and NAS. Yeah. I didn't put a NAS section down on mine. I didn't think about that, but yeah, I think this is maybe going to expand a little beyond the specific question of folder and file structure. To a little more like, you know, what are our kind of volumes? You know, like how do we have our drives arranged? What do we use each one for? I think that's fair. Like what goes on a desktop versus a server or an ass, that kind of thing.

Do you have, so let's, let's start at the basics on your desktop PC. Do you have more than one drive? Oh yes. As of now, when I built this new machine, gosh, two years ago, I put three new NVMe drives in it. One is a system drive and the other two lash together. into one volume as a games drive.

Windows storage spaces to the rescue? Yes. Okay. I have since put three more SSDs into this machine in the last three months. That's absolute madness. I mean, they're old ones. They're all old SATA SSDs. One is a one terabyte SATA SSD to put Linux distros on. Okay, that I respect. The other two are small old SATA SSDs for like scratch space. One of them I put in there to use as kind of a makeshift thumb drive.

Like download, you know, download a Linux ISO instead of having to fish for a thumb drive that might not work anymore because thumb drives are the least reliable storage in the history of storage. I just write that ISO to that internal SSD instead and boot from that. Okay, so... I'm kind of in awe.

But also because of like, that is, that is really stupid and brilliant simultaneously. It's real fast. What do you, what do you, I like Rufus for writing images to USB thumb drives. What do you use? Well, so. I just discovered Ventoy the other day. Yeah. Ventoy is a whole other subject. Is this just going to turn into a generic like here's a bunch of fun storage tricks episode? I mean, maybe. But Ventoy, instead of having to like burn your ISO. Because like, just to be clear, I have.

six different thumb drives that are in my bag for when I go to PC world for like Windows installs and Linux installs and Bezite and Holo ISO and all of these other goofy Linux variants. And then I discovered Ventoy the other day when I was looking up cache EOS and Ventoy, you just. So basically you put some business on the thumb drive and then you just copy the ISOs to it and it'll let you boot any of the ISOs from a menu. Yeah, it's basically a very minimal little bootloader.

I think it's Linux-based, but I'm not sure. But yeah, it'll effectively chain boot any ISO that you put on that drive. So what I'm saying is you should just Ventoy up your internal drive and then just copy ISOs over there and you don't have to ever use Rufus again. That is...

Possibly worth doing. I might try that. I've had mixed results with Ventoy, but I don't think it's Ventoy's fault. I think it was actually something to do with the specific Linux ISOs that I was trying to boot and issues with compatibility on this motherboard because... I don't know. You may be shocked to hear that Linux on like very modern hardware is still kind of dodgy. It's exciting. I'm sure.

First, like not good exciting, just to be clear. It's the kind of thing where like you kind of take it for granted that Windows is just going to support any brand new hardware, although even Windows is a little spotty about that. Yeah. If it's like a motherboard that came out like two weeks ago.

Well, yeah, there's always hoops you have to jump through if your stuff's not built into Windows. Anyway, long story short, I think I was blaming Ventoy for a while for issues that actually were to do with the distros I was trying to boot. Maybe I will just put Ventoy on that internal SSD. so anyway um so i i'm a much simpler install i have four ssds four nvme ssds three of them are just slammed together into a windows storage space uh array that is like game

Look, I had four slots. Are they all two terabytes? they're all two terabytes are they all the exact same model Yes, they are. And you have six terabytes of games and scrum, but you're putting like Unreal Engine projects on there, right? So that's the thing is like when I'm working on on actual shipping games. Those projects are enormous. They're three, 400 gigs easy. And sometimes you have multiple copies of them. So yeah. So anyway, I have six terabytes of storage.

in that in that array that I then have to figure out how to back up and I also have like Um, like that's, that's my work disc for like video edit stuff and podcast stuff and all of the other stuff, which is varying sizes of files. And then my C drive is just. Like the game I play most, which is like used to be PUBG these days, it's Fortnite and hell. I think hell divers is on that partition and then all applications. And then my, my home folder is where.

A lot of stuff. Actually, a lot of stuff lives. I've started putting like my OBS set up and all the different things that I use on the on the day to day live in that home folder. And I see I see the good word of portable apps is spreading. I, so I'm up and down on portable apps again. Like I think some of them are really good. I still think that like OBS as a portable app is not for me.

I use enough plugins and stuff that portable OBS is a little hinky. I will say like the Stream Deck plugin for OBS definitely requires a few backflips to get to work with a portable install. Yeah. So for me, if the stuff that requires the backflips doesn't work as a portable, then there's no reason for me to make it portable. That's fair.

I don't use fan control as a portable anymore because it's a pain in the ass to update when it's portable and stuff like that. Anything like that I'm doing through scoop, the package manager at this point. Yeah, that's it. that's uh wow so hang on is that six is that three drive six terabyte volume is that just stripes no redundancy

Yeah, I'm living on the edge, man. I back it up. Okay. Well, if you're backing everything up, then fine. Well, 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 folder is fine. You can just redownload game installs all day long. There's 500 gigs, 600 gigs of like Perforce mirrors for various projects that I'm on.

And then there's like game prototypes that I've built, like just a big folder of projects that also has engine installs in it. So like. When you like when you're working with Unreal. 4.27 or 5.1 or 5.2 or 5.3. You have to have each of those engines installed. And each of those is pretty hefty. So they're 40 or 50 gigs. So that's like another 100 gigs, 200 gigs, something like that. And then let's see what else.

So then the rest of my structure, I guess the way to say this is the rest of my structure is pretty straightforward. I have a folder for audio. I have a folder for consulting jobs. I have a folder for. get repos that I sync down for either other people's projects or for like tools that I download and run like Python scripts and stuff like that. I have an image at image edits folder, laser cutting projects. Game mods. That's mostly stuff I've made.

Uh, backups. What is this? Oh, that's just an empty folder. That's always good. And then, uh, then folders for like newsletter, podcast, video edits, PC world stuff, uh, old stray Bombay stuff, stuff like that. So wait, does like pretty much everything you work with live primarily on your machine? I'm excluding backups here, but like the primary copies of all the data you care about lives on your desktop, not on your server.

So as a peasant who only has one gigabit connections between my desktop and my PC and my server, yes. So my NAS lives in the garage. There's, let's see, one. Two runs under the house. and two switches, three switches between here and there. that would require me to do some fairly substantial belly crawling under the house to run like a direct fiber line or or even like a cat six because i i when i but when i did the house cat six was still fairly expensive

Uh, so I did cat five E and while you can do 2.5 gigabit on five E my switches don't do, I like, I don't want to have to replace a bunch of switches and stuff to do that. Yep. Yep. That gets to be a big commitment for sure. It's pretty expensive. Yes. Um, let'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. Yeah.

Are you immutable these days? Are you immutable Windows? Is that where you're going? Wait, is that a thing? Not yet, but I think that's the Windows 12 pitch is going to be. Hang on. I'm just typing immutable Windows into Google before we move on. I need to know. OK, 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? I mean.

Yeah, they have to be. I mean, that absolutely seems like the way operating systems are going, probably with good reason, right? Like it's what Windows 12 is going to do. So my understanding is that Snapdragon Windows for ARM is is a more the kernels mutable for sure. And bits and pieces of the OS behave in an immutable manner. But I don't think that it's like immutable in the same way that say.

you know, Fedora blue or something is right. Or, or Mac OS, which is basically like Fort Knox at this point. Yeah. Let's see. Okay. So. I'm trying to think how to put this like I don't really do much permanent data on my desktop anymore. It's kind of weird when I was writing up notes for this and it occurred to me like. On the C colon front, the system drive front, I don't touch anything on the C drive at this point outside of my home folder.

With like a couple, I think I've got a couple of Nursoft utilities that run straight from the root of C because it was easier from a... permission standpoint or something but 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

Oh, so like desktop documents, downloads, all that stuff works. Like downloads, like the home folder, the ones that Windows creates for you, like desktop. I've got stuff all over my desktop. It's a giant mess, but like I download stuff to the downloads folder. But outside of that, I consider C to be like no man's land at this point. I know people who still bristle at the Microsoft Store Windows apps.

sort of scheme of like, hey, you're not supposed to open this folder. We're not letting you you know touch the files in here like some people some people very much are like Fuck you. This is my drive. I can do anything I want with the files on it. I've gone completely the other direction. I'm just like, forget it, man. Like, I'm not even messing with program files at this point. Just.

Install what you want, where you want. I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to let the software, the installers, the OS manage all those locations. So like, have you gone so far as to have like the snipping tool and OBS and stuff that typically save stuff inside your profile?

save elsewhere no i i leave those default locations okay okay so like pretty much pretty much all the like home folder behavior that i guess as far as i can think of i've got at default so that's wild so like i said i use everything all the all those paths in the home folder all the time but like Outside of that, I don't even consider the C drive like a drive to use.

I guess that's kind of the way I use it, too, I guess. I don't have, like, subfolders on C outside of my profile. Like, I don't see the utility of it at this point, to be frank. Like, I don't see what the point is. But again, I've got like one is we'll get to in a minute. I've got mass amounts of storage elsewhere to put stuff that.

People who just have a more simple gaming machine with one system drive, of course, would put that on their C drive. Well, yeah, but there's something really nice about saying, OK, the only thing I have to back up from my C drive is my home, my profile folder. Right. Yeah. Um, and that's exactly it. And that's kind of why I hate that the windows home folder is still such a mess. Like the app data folder is such.

It's far. Yes. Like I wish I wish the contents of the home folder were a little more simplified and it was easier to just move the whole thing back and forth. It's funny. One of the things that's happened in the last couple of years is I'm starting to see a lot more like dot. dot by like hidden folders in your home folder yeah um that are just like linux unix styled you know dot whatever file name in that folder which is which is

Like that seems like a relatively new innovation. Yeah. I'm looking at what's in there right now of note, like dot directories. There's a dot SSH, a dot MPV, a dot make MKV. I have a dot one password, a dot infinity. Okay. A dot cash. I've got a .dbus keyrings, which dbus is a Linux thing. I'm not sure why that's there. There's a dot insomniac, which I assume is insomniac game, like Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2. Interesting. That's cool.

Yeah, I have VirtualBox. I have SSH. I have a bunch of Linux stuff. I have some, like, Olava and stuff like that. But yeah, it's, I have .bun. I can't remember what .bun is. I also have .bun. I believe that came from the 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 JavaScript or something and package manager thing or something like that. That makes sense. So anyway, backing up all that stuff. So, so.

Okay, so this all makes sense to me. So then everything gets stored on your NAS. Yeah, and I'll say, like I said, I've got that big D drive that is basically just games. Partially because I don't trust storage spaces. I did lose... Ages ago, I lost a striped storage space as a volume. It just kind of erupted for some reason. Was it a storage space or a dynamic disk? It was a storage space. This was on Windows 10, four years, five years ago, something like that. Okay.

I have no idea what happened there. It just kind of stopped working and I had to recreate it. But again, I don't put anything but game installs on there. So that's fine. Yeah. And that's why I don't trust it. That's pretty safe these days because most game installs. Like for in the early days of steam, even the first decade.

You kind of could lose save files that way fairly regularly because people used to write their save files into the Steam folder. But it seems like that stuff all ends up in app data these days. Yeah, I actually wiped that drive recently. I was like, if you want to hear more about this, go listen to the patron episode we just posted. thinking about moving that drive to to butterfs for windows um but i had why i went and wiped it and went through all the i i have steam epic battle net

Microsoft Store. And Microsoft Store, yes. I've got all those game installs on there, and I couldn't find any save files for any of the games. as I went through those directories when I wiped that drive. So I think if you have a dedicated games drive like that these days, I think it is pretty safe to just wipe it at will.

So the one exception is that I have I have a handful of really kind of old games at this point. Yes. I've done some modding on like X-Wing Alliance and KOTOR and stuff like that. And I do back those up because the process of getting KOTOR 1 modded and running right was... substantial and time consuming. Yes. So in fact, I do have a miscellaneous directory on the games drive in which currently I only have the Fallout one community edition and Aries, the emulator.

But yes, you're right. That 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 into a directory, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Gog stuff too. Yes. But you know, the point is like. And writing these notes up has made me realize that my.

Desktop's not exactly a dumb terminal in the classic sense of all the actual contents are on another machine remotely, but it's kind of leaning in that direction now with the exception of those home folder. Yeah. That I mentioned. And like, I guess I'll just say real quick, what I use my desktop for is. Mostly just dragging things onto that I've...

like want to deal with at a later time. Wait, do you show your icons on the desktop? Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah, no, that's it. I have the files on a desktop if you can't see them. How many items are on your desktop? Oh, we've run this exercise before. I pared it down a lot. a couple weeks ago so 55 icons currently oh i win 76 yeah okay all right like um this is stupid but like i i will i will drag the from the url bar in chrome to the desktop a lot of times when

I want to save like an article I want to read, but I don't want to just bookmark it because if I bookmark it, I'll just forget about it forever. Oh, that's interesting. If I drag it onto the desktop as a .url, then the icon is sitting there silently staring at me and I have to either...

Click on it and read it later, or... force myself to deal with it or just be annoyed by its existence you know what i mean like it's a little bit more of an annoying reminder of hey there's a thing i meant to read at some point this is what i use pocket for yeah there are probably better methods for this but i've probably got like at least a dozen or 15 of those 55 are articles sitting here. There you go. Videos I download from YouTube like I like to grab. stuff off of YouTube to watch later.

Oh, yeah, I just hold my phone up and record it off the phone. Yeah, that works. Yeah. And the one, the one like. official formal thing i use my desktop for is um i've moved to doing like all my podcast editing from the c drive so i've got just a like i keep all the podcast projects that i've been working on recently there It's like in a, in a folder folder on the desktop, just for like kind of immediacy reasons, you know, not having to worry about any issues working on there.

There would be cases where I have like a podcast project open in Audacity and then I would like reboot my NAS for some reason unrelated to working on a podcast and then be like, what is what's going on with Audacity? Why is this not working? Oh, right. You know, like. There's just something about working on like a project that's got a bunch of data files associated with it. It's nice to not have any point of failure between you and the data.

So, so the thing I do, um, the 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. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so. For example, if I download something that's important 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 because 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. I should really hold myself to that. Let me see what is the oldest download I have in here. Um, files from mid 2023 at the bottom of my downloads folder. Yep. That's too old. It's 123 items. That's not so bad. But yeah, I don't want to talk. I have a lot of stuff in there right now because I've been downloading a lot this week.

But but yeah, so I I generally go through and delete everything and downloads every once in a while. And desktop is. Cause I used to work out of downloads, which was a problem because then it becomes hard to go through and like, you're like, Oh, is this the important one? Or is this the copy of it? Or so.

Desktop is the place for truth. Downloads is the ephemeral place that can go away at any moment. Yes. For me, downloads is the unchanged place. Like whatever's in downloads is exactly what came off of whatever server I downloaded from. That works too. Yeah. Um, you use the, um, do you like this view that file explorer defaults to in windows 11 in downloads, which is called the one, like the, the day.

Group by. I think that's relatively new. If you right click in the folder, you know, there's a view where you can do like details or icons or whatever, and then sort by, which of course is by like name and modified. So the benefit of group by is that when you unzip a folder, then it shows up at the top, even if you sort by date modified. Because normally it does all the files first and then it does all the folders first or vice versa. Yeah, I.

I am generally a just sort by date modified. And then if I need to get the folders, I sort by name. Yeah, that's I should probably turn off the group. I've the default, I think, is group by modified. It's group by. Yeah, it annoys me. For people who aren't able to visualize what I'm trying to talk about here, it'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 under that that's like last week and then last month.

And then a long time ago. Yeah, and I go back and forth on the usefulness of that. Honestly, if they would let you sort folders. If they didn't, if they didn't separate the sorting on folders and files, I would never use the group by because like Mac OS just 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. But because Windows sorts all the files first and then does all the folders after that.

then it, then it means that like you have to do two sorts basically, which is annoying. Do you know about, you know about the shift click sort trick? But no. So if you. Like if you sort by modified in File Explorer, it'll stick all the files at the top, like you said. Yeah. But then if you then shift click name, it will then put all the folders at the top, but still sorted by modified. What? Your eyes are widening here.

This is amazing. I don't know where I learned that, but like sort by modified and then shift click name to then bump the folders back up to above the files. Oh my God, that's life changing. Still, but still sorted by modified. Yep. That's amazing. That's very good. Yes. Um, but anyway, um,

We move on to server stuff. Yeah. What's going on in your NAS? I know, I know like not everybody's going to have a home server or NAS to put bulk data on, but that's just happens to be where most of my data is. So we need to talk about it here.

yeah this is the type of stuff that would have been on my pc 10 years ago well this is the stuff that i keep on my d drive for the most part because like i use my nest to back up the d drive 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 yeah Okay, so my giant bulk storage pool on my NAS, which is called Mass.

That's good. That's pretty good. Like MAS or MASS? MASS. Okay. Or mass storage because it's like 65 terabytes at this point. I didn't know if you meant your NAS had a mass like it was the. Yeah. So that storage is broken up into a few ZFS datasets, which are sort of like logical partitions, basically. Okay. They're broken up by kind of like purpose or category, roughly. Okay, so we should explain some stuff here. So you're using ZFS still, right? Yeah.

Can you explain the difference between datasets and volumes in ZFS terms? I mean, it's sort of like a logical partition that exists inside the physical partition. You can perform operations on it. You can snapshot each dataset separately. You can manage the snapshots, which are backups effectively. You can say like, hey, I want to snapshot this backup.

data set once a day, you know, snapshot this one that I put my work on every three hours. You know what I mean? You can do discrete operations on different data sets.

And you also can control redundancy on data sets. Is that right? Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can set all kinds of different policy stuff per on a per data set level. I mean, for for our purposes here, just talking about organization, you can basically just think of these as big directories, though. Yeah. Or drives. You think of these as drives. Yeah.

For all intents and purposes, it drives, and then you can put network shares inside those drives. Because for our purposes here, we're really just talking about what I use each one for. So I've got one called Bulk that is just kind of, it's backups, archives. All of my long-term work storage is on there. So like every project for this podcast that we've ever done, all the patron episodes, like Eagle documents.

My 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 haven't gotten around to trying to back up yet. What's your file structure like for that? Do you just have like a folder name? That one is like a no-go zone. Or is it like so I have I have some spaces on my nest that are like.

it's a there's a folder called old c drive and then inside that old c drive there's an old c drive folder and then inside that one there's an old c drive okay and i can go back to about 2012 like that maybe 2010 yes Just deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper. I'll tell you, and this is probably actually getting to really Dan's question a little more directly.

For better or worse, I had for a long time been using exclamation marks as a way to float something to the top of an alphabetical list. Oh, yeah, you do do that. Because that works just fine in Windows, but then it's a little less fine.

in non-Windows operating systems. Yep. It makes things a little bit more of a pain, but I've never quite gotten off of that. Anyway, for whatever reason, I've still got the directory that is my old hard drives at the very top in a directory called exclamation mark old storage. Okay. Uh, in there. There are three more all-caps exclamation mark directories called Back, Old, and Recovered. There's one under that called SSD.

Okay. Is that your first SSD probably? No idea. Okay. Inside of that, there is nothing but a downloads folder that it looks like it came from a Windows. install of many years ago because there are files dated like 2013 in there. Gotcha. Uh, let's see. I've got, Oh, these might've come from Mac books as well. Some of these might be from like work Mac books. There's. Under SSD, there is Zback, and then under that, there is ZZ Backup.

Look, you want to get something at the bottom of the list, you put a bunch of Z's in front of it. Fair. 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 two, desktop three. Okay. It's like 10 layers deep, but I'm not seeing it at the moment. But the point is the dump of old hard drives is a giant mess of just like every time a new drive gets archived or like I said there in some cases it's been like, hey, I'm.

IT wants to take back the MacBook when I was at CBS. It's like, oh, I got to turn in my MacBook for a new one. I'm going to back up the home folder of that MacBook into one of these two. So it's just like. The directory structure is entirely ad hoc, I guess. And that's really my frustrating answer to Streetly Dan is that like within any one very limited domain, there is some kind of organizing principle to the way I lay everything out.

But it's all ad hoc from moment to moment, right? It's like... I've got these old drives. I'm going to try to organize them in some way. I've got music over here. I'm going to do that in a different way. But 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 fact, I would love to hear if there's anybody on the planet who actually does that, because who has the time?

I mean, I kind of do that, but I do it by data type. Right. And I also structure 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 day. I realized I don't need to have like I'm actually spending a fair amount of hard drive space now backing up computers to redundant arrays in the NAS. Like I don't need redundancy on those backups because they're already redundant, right? The original data is on the PC.

And the backup is the second copy. So if the backup, those backups can safely be on a single drive, which is what I would do if I just plugged external drives into everybody's computers in the house. So, so for example, I have on my, on my nest, I'm using an old sonology now. a single like four disk array, three disk array using ButterFS that has redundancy there. You're welcome.

And I have different shares for different data types. So like I have all my video, which has subfolders for movies and ripped DVDs and Blu-rays and TV shows. And then there's also one for shorts for like Looney Tunes and Pixar shorts and stuff like that that I pulled off of discs. Um, and all of that lives in a folder called video. There's a folder called music. That's all the music I've ripped. There's a audio books and eBooks that is all the Kindle books and, and, um, uh, like.

ripped cds of my old history's guide to the galaxy radio dramas from the bbc and stuff like that and um Let's see. And then we get to the criminal places. Oh, there's a folder for backups. There's actually two folders for backups. There's one that's for backup backups, and then I have another folder for file history on my desktop that we'll talk about in a little bit, which is neat. Who knows how long they're going to continue supporting that. My crimes place is my public folder.

So I have, since I'm really the only one who uses the NAS, there's a folder on my NAS called public. That's just opened to everybody on the subnet read, right? and it's kind of like i don't know like when i worked at the university for a while they let us see into the dorm networks and you'd see just like file servers pop up oh yeah they were like It was like Jim's computer. And then there'd be a bunch of pirated.

songs on it and stuff right and that was back when nobody put any kind of security or barrier to entry on their network shares whatsoever it 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 part of the building uh so Yeah, so the public folder is the, oh, I need this to be on a redundant drive, but I don't really know where to put it. And my public, it's a source of great shame for me. I'm going to open up Netty.

And take a look at the public. Oh, I also have a podcast folder that's all the podcasts I've archived over the years. So like old copies of the Maximum PC podcast and tested podcasts and stuff like that. So, yeah, like I have files from 2015 in here. That's respectable. 2013. Some of this is copied over from a Windows home server that conked out a few years ago.

Those have the date of whenever I copied them over because they're definitely older than 2015. But yeah, so that's it. Like I have old streams. I have. video games i've ripped i have stuff that people sent me that i thought was funny stuff that i made for my kids class i have here's a config.json file that i probably needed to get onto a linux machine at some point It's oh, oh, this is a smart things to home bridge. A home bridge to smart things.

config file i can just trash that i don't need that anymore how long since you used home bridge uh since i switched to home assistant whenever we started this podcast pretty much same yeah all right i'll finish going through the top line of my stuff i kind of rambled my way off the topic as i often do So I've got that bulk data set, like I said, which like arguably.

Like dumps of old hard drives and like legal documents and podcast backups or maybe don't belong in the same place. There'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? Yeah, so I use everything, the void tools, everything. I just have that index, all of the...

So this is one of the places where it's nice to mount all your network shares as drive letters in Windows because I can just feed those drive letters of the network shares into everything and it'll index those just like their local Windows drives. It just indexes file names though, right? What do you mean? It's only file name search, not contents. Yeah, it's just files and folder names. Yes. And, you know, and basic, you know.

creation and modified times and stuff like that yeah and i can tell you everything is currently indexing just over three million objects that's a lot of objects brad it is but like i said i've got Some of the drives that I've backed up to my NAS are like entire Windows installs. So like every single tiny file in a Windows install and all the program files, directories and stuff are all on there still.

Because I should probably just get rid of those, but I have more free space than I have free time at this point. I feel like the Windows installs at this point are so small. In comparison to the amount of storage available, then it doesn't matter. That's exactly it.

Yeah. Like, look, there's something nice about being able to make an ISO of one of those folders that has a Windows install on it and load it up into a VHDI and see if it boots. You know, I should do that at some point, actually. That would be fun and weird. And in fact, like I've learned more about like drive imaging and partitioning and stuff.

since i backed those old drives up and at this point i would have just imaged those to like an image file at this point if i had it to do over again i mean those drives are all destroyed and gone at this point Yeah, I feel like making ISOs of those, it always felt like it was a...

an incredible waste of space because I pretty consistently just say profile folders and then anything that I think might be useful, which means I lost things like the custom Spelunky sprite sheet that somebody made for me at one point. uh my original spelunky save file and it's not all spelunky related but like those are just the first two things i thought of yeah you're not wrong i guess if you're imaging a drive you're getting all the free space on the drive as

Use space in your image as well, but also you can compress it. I think the... The real grognards on the Discord could confirm this, but I think that... The empty space in a disk image would compress down to practically nothing, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, there's even disk image formats that do that for you automatically. Right. So anyway, I keep going off topic, but let me just finish here.

I've got that bulk directory, which is bulk data set, which is like arguably maybe too many mixed things in there. But it's my dumping ground for everything that's kind of not media, basically, because I have a media data set just like you. Yeah. And like that is absolutely the place I do the most organization.

data data set to share basically one data set per share yeah yeah okay yeah because i we don't really need to get into the weeds but like the zfs data sets there's i don't quite understand how this works but there's like sort of a quasi physical barrier between each data set so that like

If you have two data sets in the same share and you try to copy a file, it has to do a full copy from one data set to the other. It doesn't do like an instant copy. I don't know what the boundary is there anyway.

So, OK, got the bulk thing. I've got I've got the I've got the media data set like you. I've got like I've literally got a directory called video and a directory called music just like you. And, you know, within video, there's TV and movies, DVD rip, which is where I've ripped some old DVDs. Music is where my local music library lives that I've got hooked into Music Bee, which is that iTunes equivalent that I use. I've got a folder for synth.

which is basically all the dumped music files from like consoles and stuff. Interesting. Because I use, you know, I use all the FUBAR 2000 plugins that just emulate the sound engines of all the old consoles. So, you know, it's like. You know, like my music library of the entire Super Nintendo. I think we've talked about this before. Let me just see.

You have a complete set of Super Nintendo. I have a complete set of the soundtrack of every SNES game ever released, and it takes up 158 megabytes. Oh, 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, you know, played back on the fly by the emulator plugins. So I've got that for most old consoles. I've got, I've still got my old iTunes library, my kind of pre-flack, pre-lossless.

old iTunes library just in case I still need it in there. If there's anything weird or obscure, I want to go find that I can't replicate anyway. But the point is like, you know, to Streeley Dan's question, like the media, the media. Bucket is the place I absolutely try to do the most actual consistent regimented organization. Oh, and I've got a ROMs folder, I should say, or I've got like an old games folder as well. Like the media one. I mean, I assume it's the same for you.

For 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? Yeah, that's right. That's where Lex and Jellyfin are pulling its videos from there. Like MusicBee, which runs on my Windows machine, is pulling the music library from there even though it's on the server. Uh, so it's the same thing with like the mister pulls all of its ROMs from ROMs directory on that media share.

that's right i i have the mr i have a mr i have a roms folder too uh and everything is oh sorry and also like virtual hard drives like when i i don't i don't do a ton of 86 box and stuff like that but like virtual hard drives for kind of booting virtual old computers Also lives in that same kind of ROMs. So I actually keep those on my D drive just because so I, I, for my work at PC world, I keep, I keep clean windows 10 and windows 11 pro and home images.

just in case I want to grab screenshots or something from an unmunged up Windows 11 install. And I keep those on the local machine just because with Windows 11, Windows 10, they're new enough and big enough that like gigabits too slow. Yeah, sure. And I'll whip through the rest of this really quickly. But lastly, I have a sort.

Like a big sort. It's called sort data set on my big bulk storage pool. That is basically kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's just like temp downloaded stuff. It's like things I've grabbed from wherever that. Either you need to get sorted into one of those other places or deleted.

So I use a tool called FileBot to do that for me for media stuff. It basically looks at the tags you put in when you upload stuff and then it will move it into your directory structure. Interesting. Based on the rules you set. And I use... For music, I don't really care because I don't rip a whole lot of CDs anymore. But for movies and TV, I use the Plex structure that they advocate to make it easy to.

for plex to know what each thing is and you know just be able to manage it yeah i mean like i said ideally the purpose of sort is for me to either go go through it and move things to a permanent location or delete them guess what's actually the biggest data set on the server Sort? Because guess what? Never actually gets sorted. Anything? Uh-huh.

Guess what's easier than spending weeks sorting a bunch of old stuff? You should get a kid. If you get a kid, this could be a job for them. Buying more hard drives, it turns out. turns out 300 bucks for a hard drive relatively cheap compared to not having free time yes and then the last the last kind of storage thing in the NAS worth talking about is I have a mirrored NVMe drive in there. I mean, it's two NVMe drives mirrored though, so it's the space of one.

Okay. That is, that's, I call it scratch because that is like literal actual scratch space. So like I use that for, I mean, I use that volume for all kinds of stuff. That's not even just files, but from a storage standpoint, I use it for things like. For example, let's say I grabbed an archive of Saturn games from archive.org or something. You know what I mean? Like we do a lot of Mr. Stuff on streams and so forth.

That really fast storage is very useful for like if I want to do like a bulk decompress of everything that I just like if I've got. However, several hundred Saturn games. It'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? So you're not reading from and writing back to the same drive, which could slow down the decompression. Like I just want it to be done as fast as possible.

So it's nice to have a really fast, relatively big, but not super big because it's NVMe, but big enough. place to just very rapidly dump this stuff like like yeah you know like i'm reading all these archive files from the hard drives but instead of having to write them back to the hard drives i can have them decompress to a faster drive

which just gets it done quicker. I also use that volume for like all my OBS recordings go there because I just want something with no seat time and very fast throughput. I can't believe you save OBS recordings live to the NAS. That seems really high risk to me. I've never had a problem. I mean, I guess your NAS is like three feet away and you're probably plugged directly into it. That is exactly it. Yeah. But I don't want to be recording because I archive.

OBS recordings at a very high bit rate and I don't want to be dealing with seek times on hard drives or anything. So those just go straight to those SSDs. I guess that makes sense. The other thing I realized I have on my NAS that I forgot to talk about is I have my Plex data folder. the one that the basically it's like the it's like user library Like the library, like the Plex library. Yeah, like the library metadata, cache images, all that stuff is a separate.

is a separate share on my NAS. It's basically the database that gets generated as you add stuff to Plex and like, yeah, match, match, uh, and sort things and stuff. So that's, that's the other use of this, uh, of this NVB volume is that all of my containers and services run from there. They're all stored on there. So, so that's where like my Plex and Jellyfin and own.

which is that music server I run and some other stuff like that. Those all live there. And then again, the idea there is I just want the, I want the access times to be as fast as possible for anything that I'm accessing from other devices. So like, you know, I'm doing Lexer. my music library or something from a phone or a laptop or whatever. I want all that stuff to populate or enumerate as fast as it can, so I want all the database stuff to be running from very fast storage.

That makes sense. It all makes sense. So that's, that's all more like top level, kind of how we've got our drives and stuff laid out, like to the actual question, how do you organize your files from a folder structure and schema standpoint? Like I said, I wish I had a more unified, sensible answer here, but like you were saying, the media folder does get a fair amount of attention.

The old hard drives dump gets none to the point 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, right? Like I have top level. So depending.

So basically, my thought is top level folders are for whether stuff gets backed up or whether stuff doesn't get backed up. Right. So. Anything like you said, all of the games from all the different stores all go into one folder that I can just tell whatever backup tool I use to ignore.

pretty much the rest of it gets backed up because the rest of it's important. I'm actually, I'm going to stop you because of the thing that what you just said is like a, probably a great way to approach this stuff, particularly if you're backing things up, which you should be. Yeah. Like. Maybe a good way to look at it is always organize things in a way that you can exclude things from a future operation if necessary, like make things compartmentalized enough that you can.

say I want to include this type and exclude this type. Like always, always have like clear separation. Such that you can keep or discard specific categories of thing. Yeah. And it's and it's it's like so in that regard, it's I find it's helpful to have.

projects that are like, so my sub folders, for example, my video folder has subfolders for projects that are ongoing and then there's an archive for the finished archived project that I dump in there and most of the time I don't keep those like most of those aren't I don't need to keep so like

For example, in there right now, there's some PC world videos that I did at CES that are like the premiere project, the finished output video. And I 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. That's all being backed up currently. The other thing that I don't do that I probably should is that some stuff I want and I want to keep backed up, but it doesn't need to be backed up every day.

arguably my backup software is handling this automatically. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, but like, I don't need to make hourly backups of my Perforce folder because Perforce does that, right? I just want to make sure I have a copy. of projects i've worked on that may not like i may not be connected to the perforce server anymore stuff like that um

The let's see video video. Yeah. The rest of it is like pretty straightforward. Like the consulting folder is just contracts and stuff like that for people I work with and like documents that. So, for example, if I'm working on a consulting job and somebody's like, oh, hey, you need.

You need to be able to give us all of the work, all of your notes and stuff like that on this. I want to have a place to store all of the stuff. So I can just say, here's the folder with everything of yours that you've paid me to work on during this time. Thank you. Thank you so much.

And a lot of my structure is based on that. And then the last one is like, All the rest, which is like small stuff that's like inconsequential when confronted with the scale of the storage on the NAS where everything gets backed up to. So I just don't worry about it and back it up. You know what I mean? So like laser cutting projects are all like.

tiny vector files and like there's a here's the thing i worked on the entire folder is 2.05 megabytes but that 2.05 megabytes represents probably 20 hours of work right and i and so that's incredibly important that gets backed up A lot of that stuff I also just copy into a folder on Dropbox. It's like two mags on Dropbox. Who cares? That's a good...

Of course, that's the 3-2-1 philosophy, right? But that is a good thing to point out is the three backups, two local, one remote. But I do the same thing where... Like I dumped all the, you know, we've talked about it a bunch. I dumped all the saves for my old cartridges. And I've got those on my NAS, but I've also, they're small, like, just like, just like your vector stuff.

Yeah, they're like 50K probably, right? Those are so small and so important that they also are on my Dropbox and maybe also on my OneDrive. I'm making very sure I don't lose those files. Yeah, that's really cool. So yeah, and then... Let's just do like a high level pass on backups. Yeah, I'll let you take most of this because as is well documented, I bought like hardware to forward down the hall backup strategy like a couple of years ago that I still have yet to set up.

I've got a scheme in mind that I've never implemented, but I'm curious to hear what you do. I understand why you don't do it because it's fraught. And Microsoft's shift to services has made this worse. So in the old days, Microsoft shipped this thing called Windows Backup that came with Windows 7 and newer. That was a really competent image plus incremental backup software. And since Windows 11 came out. They've increasingly buried it with each update. I thought it was gone.

But in the process of doing this episode, I found it again, which was really nice because it's my favorite way to back up. Like it's installed on every Windows machine. It's really easy to use. If you have a like. I don't like OneDrive for backing up my own stuff because I have I work with really large files and it's and.

Also, the way OneDrive backs stuff up automatically doesn't work for me because I don't keep everything in my profile folder, right? OneDrive by default isn't going to back up my D drive, which is where all of my important stuff lives. So 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 who mostly just work with small files and do like their taxes and stuff on their computer.

And you're paying for office already. So you have some OneDrive storage. OneDrive is great, like fantastic. It syncs up everything across all your computers, which is weird and frustrating sometimes. But. Having your laptop backed up so that if you drop your laptop in a lake or somebody steals it or something is incredibly valuable. So like if you're setting computers up for friends and family, absolutely leave it on and just teach them about the limitations of it.

If you are like us and have more specialized tasks, Windows backup was a really good solution for a long time. I just set it back up on this machine since I reinstalled last April. And to find it, you open the old control panel, you search for file history, and it's at the bottom. It says right on my notes, but I think it's on the bottom left, actually. It's on the bottom left of the page. and it's called System Image Backup.

And what that does is it lets you create a VHD of your C drive, and then you can do incremental backups off of there. 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 have a NAS, you can point it to a network share with the appropriate permissions. Okay, great. And that works quite well. Now... I don't know how long it's going to last.

Like it's entirely possible that they're going to deprecate it at some point in the future. It may already be on the list. I couldn't find anything that said that, but like. Microsoft sites are kind of hard to navigate these days. I 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 Windows. No for real this time. And then it doesn't. Well, so the weird thing is the next thing I'm going to talk about.

is actually oh so the restore process for this is that you save you you um reinstall windows and you or use the windows recovery tools that are on your on your C drive, you point them at that ISO and then you connect the restore application. from the reinstalled version of Windows to that, and it pulls all your files back down from the backups.

Have you ever actually had to do a full restore? I have done that before, yes. Is the result pretty clean? It was identical for all intents and purposes. There's some limitations because it doesn't resize. the iso like if you put in a new bigger hard drive or ssd or hard drive or whatever it won't size up or down so like

It's for restoring to the same machine or an equivalent machine, and then you can resize from there. Right. Not that hard to resize. It's not that hard to enlarge any partition, I should say. Shrinking one is a little more fraught, but it's at least doable. The only time I've had problems is when I went from one terabyte hard drive to another one terabyte SSD to another one terabyte SSD. And one was like 50 megabytes bigger than the other. Just because of the way SSDs work. Anyway.

So Windows file history. is super weird because Windows file history is they used to be used to be shit called shadow volume copies and it works a lot like ZFS does where it saves different copies of the same file through time. on a on a regular schedule so can windows do that natively on ntfs now windows has been able to do that since like windows 7 on ntfs wow um

Sorry, that's libraries. It may be Windows 10 for the file history. But the point is, basically, you have to point it to another drive or a network share again, and it saves those incremental changes. on whatever cadence you want. You can do anywhere from like, I'm looking at the schedule right now.

You can do everything from every hour, which is the default, to like daily or I think daily is as fast as it goes. You do every 10 minutes if you want. That's wild. I had no idea Windows had that sort of thing just built in. It makes sense given that it's a corporate operating system too. Sure. But it's not on by default.

There's a little bit of performance overhead for it. It's pretty light, especially if you do like hourly or semi like twice a day or once a day or something like that, which is fine for most people. I mean, of course, you're going to be giving up any. like duplicated data is going to just eat that much extra space until you delete it you know like if you've got

If you've got five versions of a file, five distinct versions of a file, then you're going to have the footprint of all five of those files until, you know, you can't magically just kind of store data without consuming the space. Yeah.

to purge those old versions and it's not doing anything clever like keeping diffs or something like that it's it's doing it like the old-fashioned way so i'm looking at the control panel right now and mine just says you know file history is off and it's it's dark But if you've got it turned on, does it give you any insight into like, hey, here's how much space you're redundant?

kind of old versions are taking up? Like, does it give you any... ability to like purge by time or anything like that yeah so you can you can clean um you can clean old stuff so when you do the advanced settings you can say keep stuff until uh forever which is the default which is an interesting choice

Or you can do until space is needed or a month or three months or six months or nine months or a year or whatever. I guess it seems smart to have a dynamic option in there to have it just call stuff the oldest stuff as space is required. Although, I mean, it could. If you forget to check for long enough, I guess that could get risky if it pulls something you decide you wanted later. Well, so my understanding is it keeps the latest version of the file. even if it's older than the culling period.

So you're just losing the older versions, right? Yeah. I just, I just mean you might find that like, Oh, I needed a different version of that document from two weeks ago. I need to go get that. And like, Oh, it got cold. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so. For the most part, the stuff that I keep here is my profile folder. So by default, it saves your profile folder.

And your libraries. Now, most people don't know what libraries are because they nobody used them. They were a Windows 7 feature. I don't I don't know what they are. They're basically meta folders. So you could you could. say, hey, I keep my music, I keep my MP3s in a folder on C. and see users Brad music. And then also I have a big folder on D that's all my other music. Then I also have this network share.

that's um oh i see that's that's uh my in my in my slack what was it you call it slop folder no Sort. Yeah. Yeah. In sort, I keep, there's music in there too. And you'll say, take all the music for all three of these folders and put them in one thing that looks like a folder to applications. Like one meta folder. Yeah. It's a meta folder basically. Nobody used it because it didn't work very well. But it also backs up everything that's in that are in your libraries now.

They used to say, hey, do you want to put any other folders in this file, shadow volume copy stuff? And they took that feature away a while ago. But you can work around it by just making a new library and then adding the folders that you want to get backed up into that library. So I have one that's just basically my D drive. And then I exclude things like the games folder and and a handful of other things that are just big. Right. And unnecessary. So I have currently.

I think it's I basically set up a network share that has three terabytes of maximum use of three terabytes.

And I have it's like one and a quarter terabytes used backing up my profile folder and the non-excluded stuff on D. if that makes sense yeah um now it's a little janky like this should not be your primary backup this is a convenience feature for getting like pulling back an old version of something You can also use an external drive for this too if you want or an internal drive if you have one in your machine.

It took four tries, I think, when I set this up on the new machine to get it to go. It does it automatically. If you had it running every hour, this would work itself out in four or five hours. Because I set it to do every day, then I had to keep hitting the button until I got everything. But eventually it gets everything and it's fine. I think if there's network weather or if like.

you know, something hits your CPU hard or you reboot or whatever, it sometimes gets stalled out and you end up with like not complete backups. It does throw errors for any files it can't get. So there's... Because of like. path links and stuff like that sometimes you'll end up with files with Dead Space is the one that always pops up my error logs because the

Deadspace save files have a GUID that's like 25 characters along in the file name. And that puts them beyond the 256 character file limit for the Samba share that I use. So, you know, your mileage may vary. Just take a look at the log when you do the first couple of runs. Make sure there's nothing that's not getting done. Okay. And it's slow is the other thing that kind of stinks about it.

So it kind of sounds like Windows backup is still maybe the best bet here, except for the fact that it might go away at any moment. If you want to restore a version of a file, you can do it from the properties for the folder or the properties from the file. Like 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 click on it and open it and copy it in the same folder. It'll have it like.

you know, the date and the file name in the, and it just works. It's really easy. I do worry that it's going to go away. And I think I'm probably going to use this for like my daughter's computer is a perfect example of what this would be good for. Like, I don't need to keep image backups of her machine because mostly what she does is play games and do school stuff. And both of those happen mostly online.

So saving the things that she has created from her videos folder and her photos and all that kind of stuff makes a lot of sense. And this is a pretty lightweight way to do that. Okay. It doesn't protect you from ransomware is the other thing, if that's a concern. And then the last thing is I tested a couple of standalone backup software solutions. Ease US Windows Backup Freeware is what was recommended by PC World as the best free thing that's not the Microsoft one.

I do see their name come up quite a bit in Google searches and stuff. Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by it. Probably I would pay, if I was going to use this, I would pay the, I think it was.

80 bucks for a lifetime license msrp and as soon as i clicked into the page it was like hey do you want this for 60 bucks we'll give you some money off if you want to give us money right now um Just because the free version doesn't let you say, hey, you can back up drives, but you can't exclude folders on those drives. The amount of storage space backing up my Steam folder would take is going to completely be canceled out by the cost of.

the 60 bucks to buy the software if i was going to use this instead of windows backup for example yeah yeah Also, real quick, I mean... You don't really use a Mac at all these days. I have a MacBook, but I mostly use it when I'm traveling. I'm an IT admin for a Mac. My wife is a Mac user. Fair. Fair. I mean, I do use my MacBook around the house off and on.

I'm guessing Time Machine is still probably the go-to. Yeah, Time Machine is great. In order to use it, you have to set up a special share on your NAS. Yeah, that's one of them. One 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 some specific magic to make a time machine backup work right to a Samba share.

And I've never gotten around to doing that, but I really need to. The real solution is to just set up an AFP share and then it just works. Oh, AFP has been deprecated, actually. Oh, then it's NFS, maybe. I can't remember. I'm pretty sure even Apple says not to use AFP anymore. So I did that back when I was a Mac user in the 2010s.

I set that up and did that on the NAS. Her machine's backing up to our NAS now, and I don't know that I did anything special to it. Yeah, I mean, you can still use it. To be clear, if you're still using AFP, I believe that's actually, it looks like. Oh, okay. Actually, as of Big Sur, Apple no longer supports AFP servers. I'm not sure if that means they literally don't work anymore or they're just not getting updates or what, but anyway.

When I set this up for her, since I'm on a Synology, I just flipped a switch. that said uh set time machine folders but okay yes i mean you know here here is a here is a nice example of like synology does the work for you to make a time machine backup work over the network where i'm gonna have to go With my good old SMB.com. to get that working i had to enable and enable bonjour time machine broadcast via smb yeah apparently is what i did but hers is just backed up stuff like that

And it's small. It's like the size of her SSD, of her used space, plus like 20% or something, because it culls stuff as it's been used. Yeah, I'll say really quick, I know we've sort of talked about this before, but my NAS backup over the network to a backup NAS scheme is it's literally just a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive enclosure. with enough striped discs in it to fit, you know, whatever's on the NAS.

The general idea is, and I used to do this ages ago when I had a couple of just USB drives plugged into a TrueNAS machine. Before things got more complicated here, but the idea is for the NAS to have a, an automated nightly backup to that backup NAS down the hall. Yeah. And everything else gets backed up to the main NAS. So like. if I were doing Windows backups and Time Machine, which I should be, of my client computers.

Those back up to the main server and then the server backs up to a backup NAS. And then, yeah, it's just kind of backups. Yes, that's exactly it. It's like everything. And it's just like, you know, how my, you know, my mister, like all my save games are mounted on the NAS, for example. So like.

The more stuff gets stored on this main server, if that server is backing itself up to something else, then that just means everything gets caught up in those backups, which is kind of the general philosophy, which... Again, if I ever got around to implementing it, it would probably work pretty well. Well, so the thing I'll say is having started this process a couple months ago,

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 it on. The file history thing took about 10 minutes to set up. The Windows backup took a little bit more than that, and the first run was longer. I'm a little worried because I really don't leave my computer on when I'm not using it anymore, so I'm worried about when those backups are actually going to happen. Oh, I didn't even actually think to ask about that.

I mean, the file history definitely happens seamlessly, but stuff like Windows backup, is that something you have to trigger and then watch a progress bar or does it do it in the background? It does it in the background for the incremental backups and it'll occasionally throw up an error if a file's locked, if I recall, but I haven't had that happen in a long time. But 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.

For me, I don't want to lose. It depends on what most of the work that I'm doing that if I lost would cause me financial or physical harm is saved. it lives in a notion database or, or on a Dropbox server or something like that somewhere. So like if this machine goes down, the, the, the problem is runtime is, is time lost, not work lost. Yes. I think we should probably stress that like no matter.

No matter how robust or redundant or bespoke your kind of personal backup strategy is, you know, even like including the things we have described here with, you know, Raspberry Pis 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.

irreplaceable 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 encrypted drives like anything that is truly irreplaceable you should I don't know Buy some extra external hard drives and make duplicate copies of that stuff or put them in Dropbox, you know, put them in commercial services as well.

I guess 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. Yeah. Like you should still, still replicate that somewhere else. Outside of your house. Yes. Yes. Very much. And then the other thing, the other disclaimer that I always feel like we have to put here because people often conflate these things. We've talked about this before. backups and redundancy on drives and NASAs and all that stuff.

are not the same thing. Not the same thing. Absolutely. Especially in the era of ransomware. It's more, even more important now than it ever has been before. Yep. Because you know, the backup will The backup will save you when somebody takes over your entire system and encrypts everything. Yeah. But only if it's not connected to the machine when you do it, right? If everything that your machine can access is encrypted, then you're starting from scratch just like...

Like the Seattle public library did last year or year before now, I guess. Yeah. Like early raid is not backup is one way that you'll hear that put. Yeah. It's, you know, like it's not enough to have like mirror drives in one computer, you know, because even, you know, if one of those hard drives fails, the other one is fine. But what happens if that computer catches on fire, you know?

But more importantly, what happens if you get infected with a virus that starts deleting stuff, right? Then the mirror is just going to mindlessly... replicate the deletions right and it's just like look at look at the units of failure you know it's like there are two drives in one computer but there's only one computer so you've got to have it some you've got to have a backup outside of that computer because one

One catastrophic event can take down the entire machine. The last option I didn't talk about here, I don't use them as much anymore these days. But Backblaze, I've used Backblaze off and on for years and is very good. It's a reasonable price for an annual single computer backup subscription for like a desktop computer. Yes, they will not. It gets a lot of foreigners. You're backing up like I think the way they.

distinguish it is like they basically look at what operating system and what type of storage you're backing up from so like like a windows machine or a mac you can back up like a flat rate unlimited data for like you said pretty reasonable If it's something that they detect that it's Linux or it's a network share or it's like a server or NAS, quote unquote, then you start paying by the terabyte and that gets way pricier.

So yeah, their annual pricing for personal backup of a single machine is $99 a year. Yeah, which is that's totally reasonable for a client computer. Yeah, you'll spend more than that on hard drives if you're if you're if this if this is your. If this is if if you don't want to have to worry about any of this stuff, just write backblaze an annual check and like you're going to be it's a it's a good solution. In the old days, back before NASA's got popular and inexpensive.

What was the other one? Not Backblaze. Something else Blaze. Oh, one that starts with a C. I can't believe I've forgotten this already. Cloud? No, not Cloud. It doesn't matter. Anyway, one of their competitors used to offer NAS backups. that you could plug into like FreeNAS or TrueNAS as a plugin. And it was basically the same price. And you could back up whatever you wanted. They stopped. Everybody stopped doing that because it turns out it was not cost effective for them. Yeah.

And the restores for Backblaze range from you can download stuff. a certain amount of things a month i think or if you have a catastrophic failure they'll just send you a hard drive then you send the hard drive back when you've restored it right keep the hard drive if you want to buy the hard drive from them yep yep so um so anyway That's backups. That's data structure. I hope that answers the question.

It was incredibly, if nothing else, I would say it was really helpful for me to think about this because I haven't actually taken a look at how my stuff is backed up. And with the kiddos, like the kiddo has a laptop that she uses for school and her desktop that she uses for games. My wife's Mac and all the other stuff in the house that was worth kind of useful to take an audit and think about how all this works together. Yeah.

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 storage buckets. Yeah. I think, I think my next thing, I think I'm going to get a big giant, like single disc. drive to put in my NAS because I have a couple more slots and I think I'm going to put that in and I'm going to use it just to hold the backups and then I can keep.

Like, because one of the things, if you're doing the time machine or 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 over time. Right. If I put a 20 terabyte hard drive in there, then we get infinite backups as long as that drive lasts. And like I said before, you don't need redundancy. I don't feel like I need redundancy on backups.

because they're already they're inherently redundant yeah so anyway fill the slots fill the slots yeah you got room for more drives put more drives in there well each one costs a little bit of money every month it turns out yeah so Anyway, I guess that I think will do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is a listener supported show.

So that means without you all here, the listeners, we would not, we would not, there's no, like it would just be two guys talking into microphones. That's right. That's right. But we wouldn't be recording it. No, we'd just be hanging out and we're editing it or putting it out on the internet for people to listen to. My Linux project has started. Okay. Yes. Year of Linux continues. Thanks, Microsoft.

I was thinking about digging into that stuff this weekend. I know I keep saying that, but now, now that we've gone through this, now I'm thinking like, I should really work on the backup stuff. That's actually like mission critical. Like backup stuff. Like I feel better having the backup stuff under control. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like.

Not having Linux distros to play with on your workstation or your gaming PC is like kind of whatever. Not having a backup solution in place is like something that will gnaw at you. It'll kind of eat away at you. It's like, man.

really kind of like flying by the seat of my pants here but but at the same time like we should we should cover more desktop linux in the near future and i need to do some more tinkering with that stuff myself so we can do that yeah it's it's um we're talking about doing it at pc world too so there's there's Like there's movement. There's movement afoot.

I was going to say, like, if PC World is getting into desktop Linux and gaming coverage, then I feel like 2025 might actually be the year. Well, we talked about it. I mean, look, I have been screaming year of Linux ever since Microsoft announced they were killing Windows 10. at the end of this year. It's funny, when we talked about it on the Patreon episode last week, which you can get to by going to patreon.com slash techpod and paying us $5 a month.

to uh become a patron of the show which also grants you access to the discord people in the discord started sharing a bunch of videos from otherwise normal looking people who were like hey i'm trying linux on the desktop because fuck windows yeah okay i have been I've been too afraid to look at the thread for that patron episode yet because I'm afraid of...

People generally quite liked it. I'm afraid whether my rambling about wind butter FS and signing Windows kernel drivers may have put some people off, but. Someone also shared, let's see, who was it? I'm going to make sure I get it. Hannibal127.

shared the link to the thing that lets you mount windows dynamic disks and linux as well okay i'll take a look at that then yeah but but the point is if i need to get in there if i would love to see some videos of like Unassuming everyday normal people talking about trying Linux for the first time. Yeah, it's it's I mean, so I installed one distro last week and messed up my boot stuff and had to do some work on that.

But it's been interesting getting into it. We'll talk about more on future episodes. But if you want to support the show, if you want to support experimentation, if you want to learn about Windows, the desktop Linux are backing up Windows. You can go to patreon.com slash techpod and sign up there. Hey, good news also. I could use some good news. Sure. Well, Tim Epic.

One battle with Tim Apple. Yeah. In the courts. Yeah. Is that something we need to be looking at? Probably. Well, so I believe that that means you can buy a Patreon app. subscription to the show and they don't charge you extra money anymore. I don't know if that's gone into effect yet. We should be clear. There was a notice this morning that said it's in effect. Yeah. Yeah. So good on Patreon for like immediately dropping that Apple surcharge as soon as Apple.

Was forced to pivot. It sounds like they were forced to change their policy. The judge was pissed by the court. Yeah. The judge was pissed. Now the, there's nobody's, nobody's abiding by court rulings anymore. Huh? Well, we haven't. So, well, that's a whole look.

So we haven't flipped on the subscription. This means we don't have to change from the current pricing model if we don't want to. I believe also is the other thing. Oh, yeah, because they were going to make some changes there. Yeah, it means like I have not changed up until this point because I didn't want to flip on.

I don't think you could actually buy our subscriptions on the app because we didn't switch to the new model. I'll do some reading and find out what that is. That should enable other things like gift subs and stuff like that. If people are into that, because we have gotten a lot of questions about that over the years.

Anyway, thanks to everybody who supports the show. If you'd like to find out how you can go to patreon.com slash techpot. This is the longest plug section we've ever done right now. It's like there's two asides in here. We're out of control, but it's time to thank our executive producer to your patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt, Bunny Fiend for FIA president. I don't know what that means, but I'll endorse Bunny Fiend at this point.

Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Future Imagineers of America. Is that it? I don't know. I just made it up. But I'd like to think so. Yeah, I can't think of anything that starts with A that's a thing that might be the future something of America now. I don't know. A good one to Bunny Fiend in their campaign. Hopefully their campaign ends well and their enemies are crushed beneath their boot heels.

Yes, yes, we can all only hope for that. But yes, thank you. this week. As always, please consider the environment for before printing this podcast.