Saturday, February 18, 2012

Laptop Cleanup Day

My work laptop has a 250GB hard drive in it. Years ago, I would have assumed that was more than plenty of space. Nowadays... "not so much". Even though I keep a lot of stuff offloaded onto my (once ginormous 1.5TB) NAS, crap still manages to build up and eat all the space on my laptop's hard drive. Every so often, I dig through the crap to delete the stuff I don't need and offload the stuff that I want to keep.

I only ever have my laptop connected via WiFi and the network my old NAS is connected to only runs at 100Mbps. So, it's a slow process. The NAS, itself, is fairly old and, by reasonable standards, rather under-powered. Factor in the flaky wireless on this laptop and the crappy AP that Verizon provides with their FiOS service (I'd tired running a couple network configurations that allowed me to not use their AP, but none of them really played that well), and it's rather a slog to move things from the laptop to the NAS. I'd identified one particular set of files I wanted to offload. I did the click-n-drag to start the move and the dialogue box came up with the estimated time to do the work: 9 hours to move 36.4GB worth of files to my NAS? Seems reasonable (!), I guess.

Obviously, I canceled the job and re-evaluated whether I really needed to keep those files. I looked at them, again, and decided that I did. However, I wanted to organize their storage a bit differently than I'd originally set the transfer up for. I re-started the transfer - this time as three, smaller moves. Same number of files. Same amount of data. All in all, only actually took a little less than an hour and a half to do. Still butt-slow, but much more bearable than nine-plus hours would have been

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