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

[raymac46]

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.

[Cluttermagnet]

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 October 29 by Cluttermagnet

[raymac46]

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.

[securitybreach]

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

[raymac46]

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 October 30 by raymac46

[raymac46]

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. 

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.

[Hedon James]

23 hours ago, raymac46 said:

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. 

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.

I wonder if SyncThing or Warpinator would be viable solutions for you, rather than "sneaker-mail".  Or even LuckyBackup (rsync)?  I don't know that it is, or isn't, just stating a thought out loud.

[abarbarian]

19 minutes ago, Hedon James said:

I wonder if SyncThing

 

I thought of SyncThing too, it is a tad convoluted to set up but once up and running it works very well.

 

A simpler solution may be "croc". I found it to be pretty nippy when transferring from my main rig to the ToughBook.

 

https://github.com/schollz/croc

 

Quote

croc is a tool that allows any two computers to simply and securely transfer files and folders. AFAIK, croc is the only CLI file-transfer tool that does all of the following:

• allows any two computers to transfer data (using a relay)
• provides end-to-end encryption (using PAKE)
• enables easy cross-platform transfers (Windows, Linux, Mac)
• allows multiple file transfers
• allows resuming transfers that are interrupted
• local server or port-forwarding not needed
• ipv6-first with ipv4 fallback
• can use proxy, like tor

 

 

[raymac46]

Once you get the major task of copying 90GB of photos over, keeping it updated by "sneaker-mail" isn't all that bad. A photo session for me usually isn't more than 150 MB. Maybe a vacation trip might be larger. I doubt I would have more than 1.5 GB though.

I have to be careful to disable Eset's virus checker though as that can slow copying to a crawl. No need to scan every photo.

Edited November 2 by raymac46

[securitybreach]

I prefer either scp (ssh file transfer) or rsync when moving files over the network.

[abarbarian]

18 hours ago, securitybreach said:

I prefer either scp (ssh file transfer) or rsync when moving files over the network.

 

The beauty of croc is that,

 

Quote

Enables easy cross-platform transfers (Linux, Android, macOS, and Windows).

 

an it is fast.

[securitybreach]

43 minutes ago, abarbarian said:

 

The beauty of croc is that,

 

Enables easy cross-platform transfers (Linux, Android, macOS, and Windows).

 

an it is fast.

 

Well SCP works on linux and android (via andftp), those other OSs are inferior anyway.

[raymac46]

I found that SAMBA worked fine for me as a network file transfer system although it was slow. Right now I don't have any sort of always-on NAS facility. When I had my old mesh network I could attach an external drive to the gateway. Can't do that now. And I have a mixture of Linux and Windows machines (even a Chromebook) that can be on the network.

I use a Windows-based program called ACDSee for photo storage, organization, and basic image editing. Linux based Shotwell is pretty good but I like ACDSee best.

[abarbarian]

On 11/3/2024 at 11:09 AM, securitybreach said:

those other OSs are inferior anyway.

 

Yeah but loads of folks use them so a decent cross platform program is pretty useful.