[ale] archiving backups

[Chris Fowler]

This is not the first time I've attempted backing up everything I've 
created over 20 years.

Every so often someone I do not know emails me for a file, software, etc 
that I may have based on what they read on a mailing list archive.  Last 
night someone requested a file from a project I was working on back in 
2002.

Looking for this file I am reminded about how much crap I really have.  
I have floppies, CDs, DVDs, etc of backups, data, and whatever.  Many of 
these have dupes.  I want to copy all this stuff to a hard drive then 
archive it.  I need to deal with these duplicates.

A year ago I wrote a perl program to locate the duplicates using md5 
hashes.  I was then going to delete all, but one of the dupes.  The 
problem I ran into is that some of these could be installs of software 
and I needed to keep the dupe.  I was then wasting time manually 
determining which ones to delete and which ones to keep.

Last night I had an idea that may work.  Create a directory of the root 
of the backup named 'dupes'.  Copy the dupe once into that directory.  
Every where else replace the dupe with a symbolic link.

My biggest issue with backups is management of the data.  At 40 I'll 
copy something today and 6 months from now forget why I even did that.  
It could be a 1GB SVN software tree I checked out, made some changes for 
testing and then decided not to delete it.  Now I have 1GB of stuff I 
feel like I can not delete.  I can't even remember why I made the copy.  
Ugh.

I have so many CDs and DVDs stacked in my office it would be nice to get 
rid of them.  I have drives in boxes that I've forgotten what is on 
them.  I'm a tech hoarder.

Chris
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