> The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on.
Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)
Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.
I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.
> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.
People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.
Hehe, I used to create a folder as some variant of "Old" and move everything in my downloads folder into it once or twice a year, and with a lesser frequency my documents. At one point when I realised this had got about 10 levels deep, I switched to yyyy-mm format directories instead of nesting them.
I also used to back up other PCs to each other somewhat regularly, and sometimes I'd end up with those files back on the original PC in a backup of another. Fortunately, when I switched to borgbackup on Windows as well [1], this massive reduplication of files became a solved problem.
[1] borgbackup doesn't officially work on Windows, but I run it in WSL which does reasonably well for all the files I really care about (i.e. the stuff I've made). When they have particular unusual characters in the filenames, it throws up a warning for that file every time, but otherwise seems fine. I've never bothered investigating whether those particular files restore to the correct filename, because I know I've also backed up the zip file those files have come from and it's just accidental that I've backed up the extracted files as well.
I still have a bunch of these called "FromOld".
Same! It's in Dropbox now. I found the source from the very first code I got paid to write, back in 1998. I was 14, and mostly self-taught. One of these days I'm going to run it through static analysis and see how many security holes there were.