Ask HN: What is the “digital size” of your life, and what goes in? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the “digital size” of your life, and what goes in?

8 pointsnetfortius6 comments

After a professional career of 25+ yrs in IT (and some more in other engineering fields, prior to that), I decided to move onto a sabbatical / maybe RE stage (part of the FIRE). I am looking now at approx 9-10TB of data I gathered (cleaned irrelevant stuff in time, and probably will clean more, while other parts have been compressed, where such offered an evident benefit of space saving) - duplicated onto 2 x 12TB encrypted disks - for what I could consider my "digital" life. Major categories:

- personal (including family) info

- career info

- pictures (a third copy in the cloud, but planning to remove it, eventually)

- personal and professional notes I created in my time, for all of the above

- some software I wrote in time (just the code, in large part)

- professional documentation of all sorts (mainly fundamentals associated to CS and derivatives, math, physics, misc engineering, as well as specific technologies)

- ebooks + movies + series of critical significance to me

- documented trips around the world

- misc not fitting in any of the categories above

Based on the new direction my life will take, the emphasis in digital imprint growth, from this point on, for the reminder of life, could be safely extrapolated from the existing data on pictures, ebooks and trips, and will probably amount to no more than 2TB. All this being said, I assume I could say that my "digital life" will be eventually represented by aprox. 12TB of stored info.

What is the estimate of the "digital size" of your life, and what goes in yours?

I save most of the RAW image files of my photos, and with each RAW file being anywhere from 20-40mb I'd estimate the size of my hard drive to be anywhere from 40-80gb. I also duplicated the RAW files onto a second hard drive, but I have yet to move 98% of them into cloud storage.

Long story short, editing a RAW image file gives me much greater control versus editing a JPG or PNG, in which I can fine-tune the mids, shadows, colors, and more. I've periodically gone through and removed the RAW files that I know I'll never work with (i.e. blurry ones), but I ought to be doing it more often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

Something that you might want to check out: many DSLRs embed full size JPEGs in metadata headers that you can quickly extract with something like exiftool. I'd always taken RAW+JPG, but when I discovered this (when trying to find optimizations for generating preview images from raw files for PhotoStructure), I switched to just RAW.

I intentional keep my digital size very small (easy to backup, less emotional and cognitive burden), I am currently at around 40GB.

- 25GB of dslr photos (I filter aggressively)

- 400mb of code, university stuff I kept

- 250mb of documents

- 10GB in google photos

- A few GB of movies, ebooks

I recently went over the few thousands of emails I had in gmail and erased anything I don't need, I was surprised to find I only kept about 200 emails at the end of the process.

<500 GB + backups

Video and photos take up the most space, and need to be managed aggressively. I don't think there's much point saving movies and TV shows, since you can always stream it whenever you feel like watching it again (except temporarily when travelling or offline). Saving anything else is trivial in comparison, and not worth worrying about.

A couple gigs of photos that I’ll never look at again and a few megabytes of PDF tax returns I’ll never look at again. I used to just archive every email in my gmail (which I’ve had since 2004) but now that I’m running short on space there I’ve started deleting instead.

Nothing else is “saved” in any meaningful way — I’ve bought a ton of movies on Amazon but that doesn’t count, does it?

I have 670 Gigabytes of personal photos/video I go back through all the time, and other stuff... somewhere around 4 gigabytes of various things.

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