My first computer was an Atari 8-bit that could hold 90KB on a floppy disk. Enough for a handful of small games, or one larger game. Since space was so limited, shuffling files around from disk to disk was often needed in order to free up that kilobyte or two here or there for a new file.
The next computer I had was a really old IBM PC, with two 360KB floppy drives and a 10 MB hard drive. It felt like an enormous amount of space at the time and no longer required constant shuffling. As the joke goes though, “the steady state of disks is full,” and eventually the hard drive would get filled after binges of BBS downloading and it would be time to clean up. Since there was more wiggle room to work with, all I would do is walk the directory tree every once in a while, deciding which files I should keep on the drive, which ones I could copy off to floppies, and which I could do without and delete.
As time went on, things remained much the same. Drives got bigger and I could keep more files on the hard drive at a time, but the occasional pruning was still necessary. In order to manage the ever-increasing number of files, I had to organize them more efficiently too, so it was easier to archive or purge whole categories, detect duplicates, etc. WAV files over here, pictures over there, subdivide them into ‘kittens’ and ‘comics’ and so on…
Now, I have 240 gigs of disk space, and things are still much the same. Most of that is video recordings, and I have to be wary of running out of space and so every once in a while I go through and figure out which recordings I can keep, which I can delete, which I can burn to DVD or compress further…
But, I have other types of files, too. The MP3 collection, images, text files, smaller video clips, sounds, etc. The problem is that I don’t find myself going back and sorting and pruning these types of files like I used to. Why not? Well, the main difference between them is that these files are so much smaller than the video files that they’re no longer what drives me to clean up my data. I’m forced to manage the video files because if I don’t, I’ll run out of space fairly quickly and then the PVR schedules fall apart and I have no working space left, so dealing with them is mandatory. If I need disk space, I could sit down and browse through my picture directories for a few hours and free up maybe 20 megs of space, but why bother when I could push three buttons on the remote control and free up 5 gigs of disk space by watching and deleting a few TV episodes instead.
Now the only motivation left for sorting my files is to do it just for organization’s sake, in case I need to find something easily. It’s a habit I’m not used to though and, being lazy, one I probably won’t develop anytime soon. And so, much of my files remain in a rather disorganized state and it continues to get worse as I add new files.
But my collection of Star Trek episodes is immaculate.
