Slow Work

I’m currently riding shotgun to an old laptop as I work, monitoring the transfer of 10,000 odd fils onto the shared hard-drive I set up last year. This is one of those tasks that’s been on my to-do list for a while, but always gets delayed because completing that one step (itself time-consuming and irritating) unlocks a whole bunch of new work that I don’t particularly want to do.

The files on the laptop represent my entire digital life from approximately 2006 to 2017, the data dutifully copied from computer to USB drive, from USB drive to new computer, from computer to back-up drive. Usually, when I start a new PC, I create a dump-filed label DMZ and park everything from the old computer there, then start with a new file architecture based upon whatever is top of my mind at the time. This laptop was my primary work PC for the better part of three years, and it’s the last to get uploaded for that reason.

Part of my hesitation has always been the sheer level of redundancy that’s going to be involved–multiple copies of files from different years, folders that serve the same purpose but have been named something different. I set up inefficient systems and allowed them to replicate, as we tend to do when we think of computers as permanent things rather than nodes in an overarching network of devices.

This was perfectly natural thinking as recently as three years ago. Now, it represents a problem to be a solved, and solved in a way that it only needs to be solved once (if possible), with the same file architecture being deployed on new devices as they come online.

At time of writing the process if 5% done. It’s been running for twelve hours, and just barely getting through the archive of projects I’ve started in scrivener and barely thought about once I shifted over to the MacBook as my primary work PC. It’s like wandering through a graveyeard of half-finished work, pondering what might of been (and will be, eventually–I’m working my way through the list of unfinished projects, slowly and religiously). 

I figure it will take me the better part of a year to get it all sorted, working my way through folders for ten or fifteen minutes a day. Assigning things to active project folders, consigning it to the archive file, or simply deleting things that are no longer necessary.