Comment by OliveMate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OliveMate | Hacker News Reader

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My extra advice, make a note of who made what you downloaded and where you downloaded it from to help yourself and others in the future.

I recently built a new PC and, while I didn't migrate everything I saved, I made sure to keep my old system around for a few weeks just in case I needed anything.

Someone in a community I was in asked if someone had a link to some old Call of Duty shitpost from a decade ago, and I immediately recognised what they were on about. But a good hour spent scouring my early YouTube likes revealed nothing, so I dragged the old rig back in, powered it on, lo and behold within a minute I'd found the exact video I must've saved eons back.

No idea who created the said video, but I'm sure that if I noted a name or channel URL, there'd be a lot more missing media out there which others would be looking for.

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On one hand, I respect the fact that YouTube facilitates a level of privacy when you delete or hide things, obfuscating any trace of the video from playlists, etc. But on the other hand, the amount of times I've known I've added a video to a playlist only for it to be deleted with no trace... Yeah, it can suck. Recently turning a lot of unlisted videos into private ones hasn't helped in that respect either.

Made this mistake before. I was downloading mods for a game where all the mods were from angelfire sites that are now dead. People often didn't even credit themselves in the readme.txt because the game community was very small, and a lot of the people playing it were old and are deceased now, relying on other dead link sites to work. I wish I had done a better job tracking where I got all my files so I could share them and keep those people's legacy alive. Several of the sites were archived on archive.org wayback machine, but unfortunately all the zip files linked on there download as empty files. It's probably my biggest computer-related regret.

yt-dlp which the article links allows for auto filenaming templates that support channel name (or ID though it consumes more filename length) and the service it was from (eg: Youtube, Vimeo, Reddit). If you add the option to save metadata to the video (with the required dependencies) it also saves the full URL to the file, depending on the service.

A more robust method is also saving the full metadata to a separate JSON (though if one likes to rename files then it has to be remembered to rename both the files).

> while I didn't migrate everything I saved

Given the rest of your comment, that seems like an interesting decision. Why not migrate everything?

Really it's a bit daft. The secondary SSD I ordered didn't arrive for a while, and I got inpatient.

I moved as much as I could onto some spare USB sticks and used them to pass the files along to the new build. I prioritised my photo archive (backed up online too) and project files first, then music, and then assorted videos and images. I prioritised the ones which spoke to me the most, which I came back to often, those which inspired nostalgia, and those which I felt would probably be gone in the next few years. It's a little short sighted, but I was strapped for storage.

The migration was only this month, and while I wiped my old SSD to use as an extra drive in this build, the harddrive which contained my old downloads folder is still in my possession... And only now is it coming to me that I can just plug it in to my current build and transfer the files

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In terms of proper backups, I've yet to get something set up. My photo archives are backed up online and on multiple USB drives, and everything I migrated is on my new build and also on a series of USB drives... Again, I'll probably prioritise personal files moreso than random videos I downloaded, but it's given me food for thought.

Moral of the story, save your old rigs so you can find that one shitpost from days gone by

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