I found the drive again this weekend, in the bottom of the blue IKEA bin where it always ends up. A 2TB Western Digital My Passport, the black rubberized kind, with a crack down one corner from where I dropped it moving apartments in 2017. It's been unplugged for at least two years. I plugged it in anyway.
I do this every few months. Not on any schedule, just whenever I'm cleaning out a closet and my hand lands on it. I plug it in, my laptop makes that little chime, and I sit there scrolling through folders named things like photos_dont_delete and old_site_backup_FINAL_v2 and misc. This time it took the drive almost ninety seconds to spin up and mount, which felt like a small miracle given how long it's been sitting in the dark.
What's actually on it is mostly boring. Tax PDFs from a decade ago. A folder of screenshots from a game I don't remember playing. But there's also about four hundred photos from a trip to Portugal in 2014, none of which exist anywhere else, because back then I didn't trust cloud backup and I was right not to, three different services I used in that era don't exist anymore. And there's the original WordPress export of this blog from sometime around 2013, back when techpad was still hosted on a $6-a-month shared server that went down every time a post got more than a couple hundred visits.
I've been thinking about digital packratting a lot lately, partly because storage is stupid cheap now and partly because it isn't, if that makes sense. A 4TB SSD is under a hundred bucks. But keeping things "safe" long-term is its own project, drives fail, formats rot, and the services that promise to hold your stuff forever have a way of not being forever. I pay for iCloud storage, I pay for a Google One plan I mostly forgot about until it dinged my card in July, and I still keep this cracked drive around like it's a filing cabinet nobody's allowed to touch. That's three separate places for backups and somehow I still don't fully trust any of them, which is probably the real disease here, not the hoarding part.
The thing I actually did this time, instead of just staring at folder names and closing the lid again, was copy the whole Portugal folder onto my current machine and cull it down from 400-something photos to about 60. Ruthlessly. Delete the six nearly-identical shots of the same tile wall in Porto, keep the one where the light's actually doing something. It took maybe forty minutes with coffee going cold next to me. I don't know why I'd never done this before except that "later" is a very comfortable place to live.
I'm not going to pretend I have some big organized system to recommend. I don't. What I will say is that the actual bottleneck was never storage space or backup strategy, it was decision fatigue, four hundred photos is a lot of tiny judgment calls, and the drive sitting in a bin unplugged is what happens when you keep deferring all of them at once. Doing it in one sitting, with a deadline of "before this coffee gets cold," worked better than any tagging or folder-naming convention I've tried over the years.
Small tangent: I also found, buried three folders deep, an .mp3 of a podcast episode I recorded with a friend in early 2012 about, of all things, whether Instagram filters counted as "real photography." We sound so young. The audio quality is genuinely bad, like recorded-on-a-laptop-mic bad, and I'm not putting it anywhere public, but I did listen to the whole eleven minutes standing in my kitchen and it was a strange little time capsule. Worth the drive being cracked and slow just for that, honestly.
The plan, such as it is: cull one folder a week until the drive's mostly empty, then finally retire it. I've said that before. Ask me again in October whether I actually did it.