[clug] [OT] USB drives & SD cards: solutions for organised storage and cataloguing

[steve jenkin]

Overnight I started wondering what I’d done with my first USB drive (2006, 128MB, $75 IIRC, now $100 equiv vs ~$0.50/GB now - price per MB has dropped 800-1000 fold in under 15 yrs).

Which led me to think “where are all my USB drives & SD cards?”

Found the drive and it seems still readable - created a copy using ’tar’.
Which only defers the problem of cataloguing contents & cleaning up.

Does anyone have a nice, preferably easy, solution to this problem of physical storage and external naming of drives?
And any suggestions for cataloguing the contents.

For active digital photographers who have many “off line” media plus camera cards, this is either a well solved problem or they’re in trouble :-/

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I’ve also got a growing pile of USB HDD drives going back too many years - have backups of some, but no catalogue.

Externally, most of them are in a distinctive case or I’ve written a name on them with marker pen.
For anyone else, my “pile of drives" is completely opaque and would get thrown out if they needed to clean up.

How do other people deal with this problem of physical labelling and storing ’the pile’?
I’d like to be able to lay my hands on a drive reliably and quickly.

The obvious way is to clean up & consolidate files to newer drives and sell / throw away older drives :(

Some drives are boot images - this won't work if I want to be able to boot old systems.

stevej


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Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin