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A New (to me) HP Computer- Request for Help


Cluttermagnet

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A useful terminal command to check on the status of your drives is lsblk

ray@ray-HP-Pavilion-Notebook:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 894.3G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2   8:2    0 893.8G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 465.7G  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0 465.7G  0 part /media/ray/My Passport
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
ray@ray-HP-Pavilion-Notebook:~$ 

Here you can see my UEFI setup on sda1, the O/S on sda2 and an external USB disk mounted on /media/ray. Other useful commands include blkid and df. Try them out.

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I'm grateful as always for our very helpful community which has supported me often, for now 21 years that the forums have existed online. Especially significant for me was all the great hand-holding that enabled me, a rookie, to transition to linux OS's starting in 2007. That's been a very freeing experience, and I saved a lot of time and money over the years, with the added bonus of better privacy and security online.

 

One kind of nebulous goal I now have is to learn more and become better at data storage issues overall. Since my (late) 1996 intro to online computers, I have accumulated a treasure trove of photos, tech articles (radio-electronics mostly), schematics, links to great material online, etc. Just a host of useful and fascinating stuff. It has been somewhat time consuming to move it all around as I migrated from one hardware platform to the next. And the next... It's a constant challenge to try to remember where various stuff got stashed. Also, moving this data around has often proven time consuming. And it probably needn't be that way. This new docking station will probably be a big help towards that end. Having 'faster pipes' to move all this stuff around is going to improve this a lot, no doubt. Still ahead is simply working out a better personal system of dealing with this. Things get mixed and scattered often. I could stand to come up with ways of more accurately labeling groupings by topic. A lot of my memories are sitting in various thumb drives- and that does work to some degree. Adding in dedicated storage drives with a fast pipe brings yet another learning task. But it's a happy sort of thing for me, since it's overall more about 'hobbies' vs. (ugh!) 'work'. 🐿️

 

Clutter

 

Edited by Cluttermagnet
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Perhaps you should consider setting up a local network for the computers you do use and eventually store everything on a network-attached storage unit. That can get expensive, but depending on how much stuff you have, it might be worth it.

My major storage challenge is a large collection of scanned and digital photos going back 50 years in some cases. I have it on my main desktop and backed up to a USB HDD - also keep copies on a couple of other machines. But it is hardly robust. I've considered cloud storage but my upload speeds are quite pathetic, so it would take a long time to upload everything to say Google Drive. I agree that your new USB storage unit is a step in the right direction.

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1 hour ago, raymac46 said:

Perhaps you should consider setting up a local network for the computers you do use and eventually store everything on a network-attached storage unit. That can get expensive, but depending on how much stuff you have, it might be worth it.

My major storage challenge is a large collection of scanned and digital photos going back 50 years in some cases. I have it on my main desktop and backed up to a USB HDD - also keep copies on a couple of other machines. But it is hardly robust. I've considered cloud storage but my upload speeds are quite pathetic, so it would take a long time to upload everything to say Google Drive. I agree that your new USB storage unit is a step in the right direction.

 

Good idea

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I picked up a cheap 128GB flash drive at Staples and copied all of my photos to it. It is a slow writer (around 10 MB/sec) so it took a while. I can use this drive to update photo installations on a couple of other machines so I have 3-4 backups of my data. There's still room for an additional 30GB on the flash drive. That is approx 6000 .jpg files.

Edited by raymac46
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My major need for storage and backup is for digital photos. Right now I have them in a number of places.

  1. Main Windows desktop system HDD. This is where I do most of my transfer from cameras and editing.
  2. External HDD attached to main system.
  3. Windows laptop SSD.
  4. External SSD in drive enclosure.
  5. 128 GB flash drive.
  6. Linux desktop system HDD.

I have to use sneaker-mail to keep all these systems up to date but it can be done.

I'm not in a mission-critical situation by any means, but I don't want to lose my photos and family history. I believe I have enough capacity and redundancy but everything is in my home. Like HJ I am not in a flood-prone situation. I suppose I could give a flash drive to my daughter but she might lose it. :oops:

I have been able to share files using SAMBA in the past but that was when I had a router which supported an external USB port. I don't have that now, but honestly file transfer on my network was slower than just taking an external drive over to a PC and transferring that way.

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