organizing our files

A conversation with some friends about blogging and making photobooks got me motivated to pull out the external hard drive and sort through the files I've backed up from both of my dead laptops, and unfortunately it was an even bigger mess than I thought. This is partly because backing up many of the files on my second laptop involved Ryan holding the laptop on its side and pushing the power cable in (because every time it moved the computer would turn off) while I was lying down on my side transferring files. I had already backed up most of the stuff on the computer, but since this was possibly my last chance of realistically getting everything off I was a little panicked and I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally miss something, so a lot of files were backed up a second time. Also, some of the stuff from my first laptop got re-saved on my second laptop and may have been backed up one or two extra times, and of course not all of it was even worth backing up. I also have a couple of flash drives and I'm not completely certain of what is on those anymore.

I started working through all the files on Thursday afternoon. It was rough at first, but once I got going it got easier and was kind of fun. I was able to come up with a way to break my files into groups so that they'll be easier to find in the future. By the end of the day I had finished going through all of my files (I left Ryan's files alone) except for all of our pictures. When I started going through those I about had a panic attack because the pictures were worse than everything else. Up until 2012 we had no system and there were so many duplicates. Fortunately the files had the date they were taken saved in the details, so I was able to use the date to get things sorted out. I broke everything down by year, and then for the files after 2012 I made subfolders for each month. It's a lot better now and I feel like I can find whatever I need to on there now, which is really important.

In 2011 I made a photobook of our wedding using Blurb.com, but I never got around to having it printed. Unfortunately the software I used is out of date and I think I may be out of luck for that because it won't open. I still have all of the information because I have all the pictures and I used my journal for the text, but if I can't get the book to open I will have to make the book all over again.

It really didn't take that much time for our computer files to become a mess. I think it mainly happened in the process of backing up files from old computers. We moved the files over to an external hard drive and figured that was good enough, but then when you do that a few times from different devices it doesn't look so organized anymore.

Today I looked through my blog and realized I haven't shared any pictures for a long time, and since all of our pictures are organized it was pretty easy to make some blog posts about the things we've done. So to all five of my adoring fans, it's your lucky day!