Back Dat Cache Up

Instead of doing the work I’m supposed to be doing, which is to finally turn the tide against MEGA PROJECT that has been consuming my life for weeks, I spent 3 hours (and counting) backing up all the important data on my computer.

I’ve learned some interesting (ahem… interesting to me) things.

I have pretty much every email I’ve ever sent or received since I started using email. After High School I printed out all the ones I wanted to keep, and since then I have electronic backups. They aren’t organized or analyzed or anything, and it may take a wizard 40 years from now to figure out Thunderbird 1.0’s formats, but I have them.
I did a terrible job keeping organized backups on my local machine. The same folder is copied in a bunch of places, zipped directories exist alongside their origins, I have photos in my web folder, work in my photos folder, Invoices in /htdocs.
I deleted 5 photos of sweaters from when I was trying to sell them on Craigslist in 2004 so 2004 and 2005 would all fit on the same DVD. These were the same sweaters I received, en masse, when I foolishly gave family members only one Christmas gift idea, which was “I dunno… a sweater?”
I wish I knew the right combination of du, find, and xargs, so I could target the largest nested directories and files I have. Jake, I know if you read this you’ll spend the next 30 minutes finding the optimal solution. Don’t do it! Focus!
The instance of Windows Explorer I started today with couldn’t recognize some nested symlinks and had to be terminated with extreme prejudice.
I have around 20 GB of files I believe are critical. I bet 12 GB of them are (including 10 GB of photos), but I don’t want to go through one by one.