Last week I sat down with a pile 'o hard drives of varying vintage (although all of them SATA-era), ranging from 80GB to 500GB, which had been used in machines over the past ten years. The idea being to sort out what's where and why and to consolidate the interesting bits. First order of business on each drive was figuring out what partitioning scheme and filesystems were on there. I suppose if you stick to one OS over time that's a simple thing, but I have fdisk+ext2 filesystems, gpt+zfs, gpt+gmirror+gstripe+ufs and other things in the mix. Reconstructing the path from two physical drives labeled "Comice" and "Anjou" to a readable filesystem can take a while.


Anyway, interesting bits have been recovered, like an older mp3 collection of mine ripped from CDs I can no longer find (they must be somewhere in the house, in a box labeled "beware of the leopard" or something like that).

Some of the drives were once in various KDE servers or machines I gave acces to for KDE purposes, so it turns out there are various personal home directories that aren't mine on these drives, too. This provides a bit of a memory lane. One drive, last accessed in 2007 and presumably part of the original English Breakfast Network machine, has logins for myself, and Allen Winter, but also a bunch of other users, not all of whom I can place. There are sad memories, such as /home/claire/ (empty, unused), and good times like last.fm-player-1.0.1_3.tbz  (get Last.fm with Amarok nowadays).

Anyway, if you are one of aacid bertbram bhards bille danimo dannya dfaure dhaumann fremy frerich gamaral gousiosg harald ingo jaison joerg kerian lofi padams pgquiles phil reinhold schuster scott sebas winterz zecke zenithar, and you think you might have left stuff behind, drop me a note and I'll send you a tarball of your home directory. I'll try to notify those logins I can still map to an email address as well.

After some grace period, I'll destroy whatever data is left so we can say that those machines are well and truly tidied up.