Making space

I ran out of space. My computer doesn't have any storage space available for any new files from me. What do I need the space for? Good question, we're starting a new big project here at PakoMeko studios so stay subscribed if you don't want to miss any announcements regarding that.

Whenever I try to watch anything new now, I have to reach in deep in my hard drive pockets looking for files that I don't need anymore or episodes that I decided to download twice for some reason just to download even one episode. So really, there might still be enough space here but my files are just unorganized and all over the place. In organizing the files I have I will go through the following procedure.

Setup the home directory structure

The directories that will stay here or be created are the only categories files that can exist in this directory. These are the important files only or if it helps you later on you could make a folder to dump all irrelevant files into. For me these would be the dot configs, pictures, projects, drawings, music, scripts, and documents. Of course all with sub-directories to organize their contents. All stray text files, screenshots, video clips, and random files need to go, either permanently deleted or to a place outside this space.

Collections and big files

For files like anime series, image sets, movies, games, virtual machines, recordings, backups, and OSTs we keep them off the main drive and put them in a larger drive dedicated for collections. For ongoing shows, backup, and updates where we download or make new files over time we need a temporary folder to hold them all. This can be a spare disk or anything really where you could freely dump everything like the usual downloads folder. Of course this can create the problem of duplicates, corruption, and trash worse again so I recommend putting it in a smaller drive to force yourself to go through this folder and organize more often. That wasn't the case for me. I set one of the biggest drives in my computer to be the temporary location of all my files and now I've messed up. I know I've let you down.

Getting more hard drives

If all the reorganizing doesn't give me the space I need then I'll just buy more drives to store everything. Assembling a low power storage box with the current computers that I have to serve the files is something I'm looking into doing once I start getting a new main computer. It doesn't seem worth it to keep the file server on all the time though. But I don't know yet, I hope I get other uses for it or find a way to make the power consumption go low on idle and to manage the network. I'm excited for that.

So, right now, I found enough space to start the project and get going by just doing a bit of reorganizing. I'm not yet even closely done on any step here but I was able to get it started without spending money or deleting anything important to me so I'm happy. One terabyte has served me well enough for about ten years watching anime, doing random projects, collecting music and pictures, keeping backups of my phone and camera images, and storing school stuff. It still is working well for me but I image that our future here would have me storing more of that and working on projects with even larger file sizes so I will keep an eye out for that in the next computer systems.