From Chaos to Index

The Baseline Audit

I’ve started and abandoned more projects than I can count. Most weren’t failures — just fragments. Things I planned to finish “later,” once I had time. Once I had clarity.

Instead, they piled up. Year after year. On hard drives. Across laptops. In folders named archive2, final_final, or just untitled.

I always assumed my future self would sort it all out. That I’d return to it, finish it. But finishing the new things — the urgent things — meant I never really went back. The backlog just kept growing.

But now, with NOX and a stronger system around me, I finally feel capable of facing it. Climbing the mountain. Creating one clean index. And publishing the projects I always meant to.

What Surprised Me

The drives were healthy. I expected corrupted files, unreadable partitions — but almost every drive mounted cleanly.
There were more photos of me than I remembered. The small, important things I’d forgotten were still there.
The duplication was massive. Some drives held 1,000 copies of the same folder. Others had 21,000 files in a single directory.

Patterns and Traps

One of the hardest parts of hard drive diving is not falling back into the old media. The people. The projects. The versions of yourself you’d rather forget — or miss.

The second hardest part is realizing just how much digital weight you’ve been carrying.

“Oh shit,” I said out loud, staring at 5,000 untagged images.
Then again at 21,000.
Then again, again, again.

The pattern I’m learning is this:
Don’t get lost in the subjective stuff. Not yet.
Stick to the facts:

Drive label
Capacity
Created date
Available space


        {
          "name": "1",
          "capacity": "2 TB",
          "available": "39.5 GB",
          "used": "1.96 TB",
          "contents": ["Sequential Images"],
          "purpose": "images",
          "date_range": "2016-2024",
          "notes": "Organized; missing 2019, 2020",
          "created": "November 14, 2022 at 6:14 PM",
          "mount_state": "healthy",
          "clone_of": null,
          "date_checked": "2025-08-03"
        },

Clones and Gaps

Clones: At least 6 drives were full or partial backups of others — sometimes intentional, sometimes not.
Missing Years: 2019 and 2020 were absent on multiple drives — like a digital blackout.
Named Themes: Certain drives were clearly tied to specific phases: arrow-hammock, portfolio, website, multimedia attempts.

Emotional Logs

“Would you recognize it if you saw it?”
That was the question I wrote in the margin of my logbook.
I meant it as a point about how time can affect value.

I think it’s also the core of the project:
Seeing what I’ve carried.
Deciding what’s worth keeping.
Knowing when to let go.

And now the question becomes:
How do I get this all into one clean space?

That’s the next phase.
But for now, I know what I have.

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