Digital life - Chaotic life

So easy to save stuff just to lose it

Today was an interesting episode on my digital life. I thought that it would be handy to add my CD album collection list here on my web page so in future I can always check on my webpage if I already have some album or not. I knew that I had this list of my albums on text file somewhere, at least on my mail.

Since I remembered that it is in my mail I went to my webmail and opened the draft where I had those albums listed. I had my albums listed only on copy-paste in message body in email but CD singles and EP's were as an attachment. Of course it first look that there is no any kind of issue so I just copy pasted the content of the body from email draft, pasted it on VIM on my website host and boom there it was, list of my CDs in a beautiful list. Handy... or at least I thought so until the harsh reality hitted against my face. Character encodings were totally messed up and scandic special characters and cyrillic characters were all totally messed up. When I checked on my mail, it was already a mess there so it was not issue what came on a paste to VIM in terminal.

Well the most important thing was still that I had at least my CD list saved even tho letters were totally messed up since it would be much faster to go album by album and fix those letter issues if needed than just rewrite everything to new file, but still I thought that I will rather find out the original list file what was just pure plain .txt file. And here my friends, here I started to notice the pattern again what is happening just way too often - my file was somewhere and I had no clue where on earth it is. It is so easy to generate content on digital era and save it, but it is also too easy to lose it somehwere. This has been always true, but it somehow feels that it is more bigger issues nowadays since there is so much more possibilities where that file could have been. Back in days you had just one or couple of computers and those were almost only realistic places where that file could have been, but that is not the case anymore.

So my hunt for the file begun. I thought that I probably have just copied that txt file to kapsi.fi linux servers where I have my IRC client running all the time. Well, it was not there neither in "lakka" nor in "xob" (those are server names). Dang. Then what about my work computer? Well, crawling the filesystem did not got me any results, that cds.txt was not there either. Maybe on my personal MacBook Pro? I opened the machine and started searching but no, not there either.

Since I had spent that much time writing it (over 800+ CD's listed there) I knew that I had used common sense and backup it somewhere. Maybe it was on the Dropbox? Well... it was not the case. Lots of other crap but not that file. And what about the iCloud? Nope. Not there, only lots and lots of other files living happily together in chaos.

At this moment I already started to be quite frustrated - how on earth I could be so careless and undisciplined with a file that have taken me so long to genearte? Surely it must be at least on my NAS. I booted my NAS and started to open up about this situation to my workmate and before the NAS was even booted then booom! Suddenly it came to my mind where that file could be! I logged to my Raspberry Pi and crawled the filesystem with find command and there it was! The lost file was hanging there on the filesystem like a boss. What a lucky reunion it was! I immediately copied the file to this web server and made a HTHML page of those albums so at least now the content is saved here on this web page. I have also daily backups of this whole web site to another server + HTML pages are in git on another place as well so now it should not get lost that easily anymore. At least I hope so.

In reality the situation is worse on bigger scale

It is good that I got happy ending on this story of this missing file, but the reality is still much worse. The lost file did not represent just the one file what is missing. No. It represents the chaotic nature of this digital era where it is so easy to generate the content, store it, and then later just figure out that you have no any kind of memory where on earth you have stored that file. There is no any One Source Of Truth where you can always go and get your file. Of course this is not the case for all the people and for them situation can be much better, but for me this is the case and that must change in future.

Since I now have this personal web page I started to wonder that what about if I just start to pile up all my files here if those files are not private by nature? What if I would just create this site as a central hub of all of my files what can be shared or at least where no harm is done if somebody accidentally figures out that there is these files? At least then there would be one source of truth for my files and data and I could find my stuff more easily without wondering if the document is on iCloud, S3, DropBox, Toshiba T500, Windows PC, MacBook Air, Rasbperry Pi, email, work laptop, my another older laptops, external hard disks, NAS or whatever linux servers I have SSH account.

Since it is so easy and handy to just copy files from machine to machine I have a problem that I have multiple different versions on multiple different machines. For example I have same mp3 files on multiple locations where on some places I have metadata issues fixed but on another metadata is still broken. Then when I copy albums to mp3-player I had problems because of this metadata. If I would have one source of truth that would not be the case.

In reality there is still so much things that cannot have only one central location. For example my personal photos and videos etc. are files that I cannot store on my web server and those must of course stay only inside my home. That is what the NAS is for, but since my current NAS uses too much power and is not totally silent I do not keep it up and running all the time. Maybe I should just buy small NAS what would be the central location of everything what should be available in my home? Time will show, but I guess that would be the best case for this kind of media.

Still whatever the solution is, all of this is the issue of clutter. Digital clutter is surely different than physical one in that sense that it does not steal your physical space, but it still can get you frustrated and overwhelmed.

In future I definitely should start paying more and more attention to my digital life and order of it. Files just ends up random places on random servers and then I have no clue where those files are - or where is those files newest version. Only way out of chaos is to create order and stay in it. For many kind of files I can at least start keeping this page as a haven of lost files. Hopefully the future is brighter on this digital darkenss!

2023-03-07