Month: August 2003

Like most geeks, I’m a complete packrat when it comes to collecting copious amounts of seemingly useless information. Years of saved email, textfiles, Web pages, ZIPs, PDFs, Word documents, etc. Underneath the surface of that raw data is the occasional gold nugget of priceless information that, although not yet of value, may some day shed light on a future conundrum. It is for this reason that I have been religiously archiving all raw inbound and outbound data processed by my collection of machines since the early nineties. And it is this massive collection of information that has saved my butt on more than one occasion as I pulled an answer to a problem out of thin air because I remembered that someone emailed me about a similar issue four and a half years ago.

Over the years, my collection started out as a few megabytes and now spans a hundred or so CD-Rs and the majority of an 80 GB hard drive. As more files are collected the archive grows and becomes even more unwieldy. Unfortunately, this has turned the archival process into more of a frustration than anything else. Find and grep only go so far and a misplaced answer is worse than no answer at all. I won’t even touch on the subject of how many times I’ve searched for a piece of information that I know I have but can’t find due to my lack of a proper index and search capability.
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