Before the Shadow Play

Category: Organization

  • Archiving papers: a strategy

    I’m helping a friend archive a lot of notebooks and papers that they’ve accumulated over several years of writing. They’d like to be able to travel, but are a little worried that not having any backup for all this work is risky; fires, floods, and theft do happen, so even a fireproof box isn’t a guaranteed backup.

    We’ve therefore been photographing the papers, page by page, and creating a 3-2-1 backup of all of the digital photos. After some experimentation, we’ve come up with a workflow that works very well:

    • Create a Photos library that is not the primary. (She has an art business and needs to be able to use her iCloud-synced Photos library without it getting cluttered up with hundreds of photographs of pages.) This is most easily done by holding down Option and launching Photos. When the “select the library” dialog comes up, create a new one.
    • Photograph the items on a second iCloud account’s primary Photos library. This automatically syncs them to that accounts iCloud Photos.
    • On the machine where the secondary Photos library lives, log into iCloud.com with the second account.
    • On that same machine, open Photos with the non-primary library. (Hold down the option key and open Photos to allow Photos to select the non-primary Photos library.)
    • As batches of photos are taken, wait for them to sync to iCloud, then on the iCloud.com page for the second account, download the batch to the machine where the secondary library lives.
    • Create a new album in that secondary library, and drag the new batch of photos into it.
    • Put a sticker on the notebook/folder, and write in an ID (A, B, C, etc.) and the date it was photographed last. This allows active notebooks to be archived safely. (You should also add a note on the last page scanned with the date and album ID so you can cross-check.)

    Photographing the cover of the notebook/the file folder the pages are in helps make sure that you keep different batches of photos separate. If you do this, it’s much easier to keep track of which pages belong in which album, and gives a better way to track back which things are done and which aren’t.

  • iTunes Swedish Death Cleaning

    If you haven’t heard of “Swedish Death Cleaning”, the idea is that when you finally do drop dead, it’d be polite to not saddle whoever is taking care of your stuff with a big job of “is this important? should I keep it? should I just give all this away, or throw it away, because it’s just too much?”. Also, living with just the stuff that actually means something to you on a daily basis, as opposed to “I may want this someday, so I’ll keep it in my live gathering dust and generating clutter.”

    I definitely need to do more of that in my physical life, but this weekend I embarked on it in my digital one. Like most people, when I finally had iTunes and no longer had an actually “how full are my shelves?” physical limit, I started hoarding music. I had a lot of stuff from my old CD collection, music I’d bought from iTunes, the StillStream library from when I was maintaining the music library for that station’s ambient robot, music from friends who’d lent me CDs, stuff I’d borrowed from the library and timeshifted into iTunes to listen to “later”, free releases from Amazon…basically a huge pile of stuff. Worse, I’d put all this in iTunes Match, so even if I cleaned out my library, turning iTunes Match on again would just put all the crud back.

    In addition, my partner didn’t have a music library at all because her internal disk on her laptop was too small to keep all of her work and optional stuff as well. There was an offline copy of her old music library, and it too had also grown over the years from music lent to her, music I thought she might like, etc. She wanted to be able to pack up her CD collection and put it into storage, and maybe get rid of some of it as well. So we needed to take our old libraries and clean out anything that we didn’t want, and then see what each other might have that the other person might want afterward.

    I spent a couple evenings last week ripping the CDs she didn’t have online yet into a separate library, so they wouldn’t be part of the existing mess, and then went through and did the following in a brand new library:

    • Anything she actually owned got copied in. iPhoto’s ability to let me photograph the discs on the shelf and copy the text off of them came in very handy to make sure i got them all.
    • Anything I didn’t find in the library on that pass got ripped into this new library.
    • The not-previously ripped CDs in the secondary library were copied in.

    At this point, she had a clean “definitely mine” library. Now it was time to clean mine up. I had done one pass already to strip it down, but I wanted to make sure that I both cleaned out my iTunes Match library and made a conscious decision, “keep or not” for anything in there that I didn’t already have in the stripped-down library.

    The easiest way to do this was to to create a brand new, empty library, and connect that to iTunes Match, after turning on the “I want lossless copies” option — this is apparently new in Ventura, and is very welcome. Once this synced up, I could download and copy in only things I knew I wanted to keep. This meant I would actually have to look at the music and say, “do I really want to listen to this again?”, but not having to pull it out of an existing library would help.

    In addition, my partner had asked me to give her a copy of music of mine that I know she likes; we share a liking for world music, and several different other artists. After a little thought, I came up with the following:

    • There’s probably music in iTunes Match that we both want, and there’s definitely music I want. So let’s do this:
      • Create a new folder on a scratch disk that will contain music to add to her library.
      • Do the same for music I want to add to mine.
      • Drag those into the favorites in the finder.
      • Drag the Media folder from my target library to the sidebar as well. This will let me quickly check to see if a given release is already in my library , and if it is I can skip downloading it altogether, unless I want to give my partner a copy.
      • As I process each release in the Match library, I do the following:
        • If my partner would like it, download it.
        • If I want to keep it myself, open a Finder window using the Media folder shortcut and check if I have it.
          • If I do, simply delete it from the iTunes Match library (which also takes it out of iTunes Match).
          • If I don’t, download it.
        • If I downloaded it, right-click on one track in the iTunes list, and “Show in Finder”. This pops up a new Finder window with all the tracks for the release in it.
        • Command-Click on the folder name in the top bar of the window and go up one level to see the release in its enclosing folder.
        • Drag the release folder to the sidebar aliases for the “music to add” folders as appropriate.
        • Delete the tracks in iTunes. This removes them from the iTunes Match library, and iTunes Match as well.

    This took the better part of two days to finish, but I now have two cleaned-up music libraries, and an empty iTunes Match. I am considering whether to retain iTunes Match, mostly because it’s not a “backup” — it’s just a convenient way to share music across my devices, and doesn’t guarantee I’ll get the original file back.

    I’ve probably lost fidelity on some of the tracks I added to Match, and it’s possible some of them now have DRM. I will do another pass at some point and see; I’m not sure if it really makes a lot of difference to me right now, but I can always play them through Audio Hijack and re-record them to remove the DRM if I decide I want to.

    We also wanted a list of “what you have that I don’t” for both the final libraries; I was able to do that with Google Sheets, but I’ll post that as a separate article.

  • Useful shortcut for cleaning up files

    Useful shortcut for cleaning up files

    The situation

    I’m in the process of moving from one computer to another. My old 2010 MacBook Pro is still running very well with a replacement SSD for its internal disk, but it’s stuck at Catalina and won’t be going any further, mostly because the firmware has a password which I’ve lost, and Apple can no longer unlock machines that old.

    So if I want to do development in a recent Xcode, and I very much do, I need to upgrade. One side-effect of my recent layoff from ZipRecruiter was that they let me keep my machine, so I now have a 2021 M1 Pro that will run Ventura. (It’s possible that I’ll never need another machine, given that Apple machines stay supported for ~7 years; in seven years I’ll be 73, and either dead or unlikely to be programming on a daily basis.)

    The problem here, though, is that the internal disks are considerably different sizes. The old machine’s internal disk was 2TB, because that was the biggest affordable SSD I could get at the time. The new machine’s disk is 0.5 TB, and a straight copy from the old machine to the new is not an option — the immutable law of storage is that if you have it, it fills up — so I need to clean up the stuff I’ve got on the internal and move it elsewhere.

    I’m using a mixed strategy for this:

    • Anything on the internal disk will be there because it has to be.
    • Anything I want to keep and be able to access, but that doesn’t need to be available right now is going on Dropbox. (I will have to back this up separately; I’m going to work out a script to back it up with Backblaze.)
    • Anything that I need quick access to will go on an external 2TB SSD, which I will back up with Backblaze.

    So far, I’ve done the following:

    1. Gotten a copy of my most recent backup of the 2 TB internal disk from Backblaze on a 4TB spinny disk. (Costs me the price of the spinny disk, but worth it.)
    2. Copied the failing spinny disk copy of my old backups to an external SSD. (In hindsight, it should have gone to the empty space on the spinny external; I may do that later).
    3. Started walking through the SSD copy of the old files to clear space on the SSD for the files I want from the Backblaze spinny disk.

    The actual meat of this post

    So fine, I’m cleaning up the SSD. The actual thing I want to note here is that I have a collection of ebooks on that external that I want to file onto a folder in Dropbox. Problem is that a lot of them are probably already there, and the drag, get the duplicate dialogue, dismiss it, trash the file process is tiresome on the hands. I discovered a significantly faster way, and I’m noting it here for anyone else who might be doing something similar.

    1. Open the source folder (for me, that’s the “books” folder on the SSD) and the destination (that’s a categorized and subfoldered “Books” folder on Dropbox).
    2. For each file in the source folder, use the Finder search field in the Dropbox window, limiting the search to just the “Books” folder on Dropbox, and start entering the name of the source book.
    3. If the book is there on Dropbox, you’ll find it — and if there a duplicates, you can clean up the duplicates right from the search results.
    4. If it’s not there then it can be dragged over to the appropriate folder in “Books” on Dropbox after clearing the search field.
    5. In either case, the book is now either found or filed, and can be removed from the source folder.

    This is way faster and easier on the hands than dragging and dropping the books one at a time.

  • Considering the Cloud

    After the LastPass revelations and reading Jason Scott’s FUCK THE CLOUD essay today, I started considering what I should be looking at in terms of data security this year.

    Not as “can this data be stolen”, but as “can this data be lost irretrievably — and how bad would it be if it was?”.

    I have already lost access to my Twitter account, but I don’t think there’s much there that I’d care about if I never saw it again.

    I still have the EMUSIC-L archives, even though the ibiblio site has been broken for years. They are incomplete; we lost some of the really good stuff, including Mike’s hot-off-the-experience posts about the first Team Metlay gathering. Still, okay.

    My VFXsd sequences and patches are backed up on slowly-deteriorating diskettes, and it’s only a matter of time before those go. I think I have sysex dumps of all of them; I can replace the diskette drive with a USB one, but the SD-1 is getting long in the tooth, and I’m not sure I really mind if the various didn’t-quite-ever-amount-to-anything sequences are lost before I record them.

    Photos. I have several dozen photo libraries in various states of cleaned-upness, and that is a project I should devote some time to actually catching up on, even if it’s simply to pull out the good ones and let whatever happens to the rest, happen.

    Facebook does allow you to dump everything off, and it’s probably time to grab another archive.

    Most of my music is up on the Internet Archive, which is likely to outlast me, and that’s OK. Should consider packaging more of the tracks on Soundcloud into albums.

    I’ve lost all of my archived data from the mainframe era, and I’m a bit sad about that; there was some really elegant stuff in there — elegant for OS/360 and MVS, I guess…

    I’ve shrunk my physical memorabilia footprint a lot; I have a few things I’d hate to lose, like my board from the 360/95 (did lose my mass store carts and my original FE manual somewhere along the way) and my pocket trumpet, but not as much as I thought before.

    So I think my work for this year will start with finishing up the cleanup of both of our LastPass vaults — that’s mostly done at this point, but making sure we both have a clean copy is a chore — and then finding a way to compile and then deduplicate all those photo libraries (and separate my photos from Shymala’s — we did and still do tend to take shots with each other’s equipment and then forget to split them up).

    I anticipate that job will take quite some time.

    Once that’s done, I’ll come back to the various places my music is stored and get everything out on a release on Bandcamp and the Archive, which will make it available and as safe as I can make it.

    I’m backing up my personal laptop with BackBlaze, which is probably safety enough for most of my data. Will need to review though and make sure it’s all getting backed up. Possibly spending a little to save the various backup disks in BackBlaze is a good idea as well…

    I’ll revisit this over the year, but writing about it helps clarify my thinking some. Back to the passwords.