Mad Archive Deleting

[Joss]

I decided to have a day of just fiddling with rubbish rather than working on one of my many and varied projects that have yet to make me any money.

A good day for archiving. But before I got on with that, I decided to see if I had any directories archived on disks that I could happily delete. These are mostly directories that I copied over to an external drive for safety at some point - not long term backups, but just panicking because I was updating something or whatever.

So, on an external WD drive, I found a directory innocently called Documents. Inside, was a maddening mix of docs, old websites (loads of ancient WordPress and Joomla ones), website experiments that never went anywhere, huge amounts of downloads that I never got round to using .... you know the sort of thing.

None of this is now needed as it was all emergency backup stuff and the originals are either are somewhere archived proper or were long since deleted and no longer leaded. This directory is ripe for the bin.

So, I decided to delete it ..... several hours ago!

It is really easy to lose track of things, isn't it? Apparently, I am deleting 205,849 items, and it is taking quite some time. Four hours so far with another 6 hours to go, according to the window.

This WD drive better buy me a beer when I have finished!

[szabesz]

1 hour ago, Joss said:

I am deleting 205,849 items, and it is taking quite some time. Four hours so far with another 6 hours to go, according to the window.

You might want to do some recursive CLI "magic" in order to get rid of them. 10 hours? I would never wait for it, it is better to do it at a lower level  

[Joss]

This is just through a windows utility accessing A WD mycloud drive. But I am ignoring it and doing other stuff

[DaveP]

Those mycloud drives are not the quickest gizmos in the world. One trick is to switch off automatic image thumbnail creation, which speeds things up to a crawl, at least when saving new files. The good news is that they run Linux, so you can do all sorts with them. (Albeit slowly...)

[Joss]

8 minutes ago, DaveP said:

Those mycloud drives are not the quickest gizmos in the world. One trick is to switch off automatic image thumbnail creation, which speeds things up to a crawl, at least when saving new files. The good news is that they run Linux, so you can do all sorts with them. (Albeit slowly...)

 

Not sure how to do that. I wasn't aware it even created thumbnails. I just access it through the network

[DaveP]

We had one at a place I used to work. If I remember correctly, if you browse through the desktop app thingy, you see a thumbnail for each image file, and it takes a big chunk of the limited horsepower available to maintain them. Also, if you only use it for storage and not as a streaming media device you can switch that feature off as well which is supposed to help.

[Joss]

I will go peek. I also found a post about SSH-ing into it and removing things like hidden files and so on

https://community.wd.com/t/hidden-wdmc-directories-created-by-mcserver-and-photodbmerger-and-the-deletion-of-them/91860/8

Though I will research that a bit more first. BIt of a valuable storage this!

[Joss]

Eventually got it sorted - eek! Aside from finishing deleting, I have now stopped the media side constantly indexing and cleared out thousands of files associated with creating thumbnails for the cloud side which I don't use. (Note, I have had this drive for ages so it is already long past warranty).

Everything much faster now.

Really this is a lesson in complexity. If you try to be connected to everything all the time as we are pushing to be in our world, eventually it gets so complex that is collapses around you.

Chalk and slate had something going for it