[lug] syncing deletes in backup (or picture workflows)

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi (replying to both tony and Rob in one message)

Anthony Foiani wrote:
> For whatever it's worth, I find that my time is more valuable than
> disk space.  (And with 2TB drives costing only 130$ these days...)  So
> I just keep every stupid photo.

Problem is not space/money - but you have to multiply your number by
more than 3, since I have a need a drive for the desktop (SATA, your
price is almost right), USB (your price is optimistic, especially for
self-powered, which are the only ones I consider) and latop (much
higher price, if not impossible to find). In fact at present space is
a problem only on the laptop.

But my main problem is clutter, so I don't *want* to keep every stupid photo.

> For another perspective on this, consider:
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/17/New-Photo-Workflow
I know this, thanks.
I''ll have a deeper look at your scripts, thanks for sharing them

Rob Nagler wrote:
> I like Bray's "ruthless" weeding.  I think this is essential.  Saving
> TBs is easy, yes, but weeding them decades from now is gong to be PITA
> for somebody, if not you.

Agreed.

> Davide sez:
>> But in some others, the thing is plain impossible.
>
> I encourage you to take a more positive attitude.  :-)  Sit down, weed
> them out, document tersely, and move on.

It depends on your life. In mine so often this has become: memory card
is full or almost full, we're leaving house in 10 minutes, the kids
are screaming, the wife is in a hurry to do something before we leave
and ask for my help. Either:

a) forget about taking the camera
b) delete (some) pictures randomly on the camera when needed
c) put them on the laptop and delete all of them on the camera (finger
crossed that e.g. the laptop won't be stolen, or its disk won't break
etc)
d) put them on the laptop and delete some them on the camera  - making
more PITA for later
e) put them on the laptop and do a quick rsync, with all the downsides
on not sifting/sorting/deleting them *before*
f) send rest of the family to hell, and "sit down, weed them out,
document, and forget about that trip - hoping that the rest of the
family went and had fun".

So far I've been doing mostly c) sometimes (when there was something
special I feared to lose) d) some others (when there was not too much
to be appreciated) b). I hope you won't be offended if I say that I
don't like your suggestion to do f) - you can say: why didn't you do
that the night before, instead of waiting for the morning
right-before-leaving? And I can amuse you with the time spent to bath
the kids, put them to sleep (without much of a success), and one
awakening when the other felt asleep... But I'll spare the details, I
hope you've got the idea :-)

No suggestions on the tool I was looking for, then? Let me quote
myself in case somebody is joining the thread only now:

> I think what I need is pretty simple: a version-control-system-like
> thing which would do just the bookkeping (i.e. this picture must be
> deleted, this one has been renamed - uncommon, but happened: there was
> a name collision - , this other picture is missing from this drive,
> but must not be deleted from the backup).

Of course this tool *must* lack the most important feature of a
version control system, i.e. ability to revert to a previous status,
which would be too space consuming for this amount of data.

Thanks everybody for contributing,
Davide