Smaug, Archives, and Mistakes

341.2025

Morning, The Hobbit in my hand—finally embarking on this journey—a sip of coffee, the brisk white of Winter through my windows, the ambience of a fantasy library in my ears. As I approach the end of the first chapter and read this quatrain:

my attention is pulled to it. As I finish the chapter, I go back and read it once more, and again. Through a leap of association, I realize I have a bunch of data, slowly bitrotting away in my multiple HDD, SSHD, USB drives, MicroSD cards, and CDs. This long-forgotten gold (data) in dungeons deep and caverns old (external storage spread across my appartment) has to be dealt with, ere break of day (before I start another project, and forget once more about my archives that date back over half a decade).

Going through all these drives is an exhausting journey as my past self seemingly did not enjoy logically organizing files nor periodic mirroring, leading , respectively, to a lot of diff checking and to lost data through damaged drives. I am nonetheless uncovering mini-guides I had written for various homelabing projects, books and research papers I had hoarded, and music I used to listen to prior and during the pandemic. It has also dawned on me that I have a long long list of bookmarks in my various browsers on my various systems, and various videos saved in my Youtube playlists. This is a long project but a valuable one: putting the pertinent data offline and redundant so as to prevent any further loss of data.

But for all the good, there is bad: I have found some digital journal entries that survived the burning of my physical journals of old. I've read only one, and it was enough to relive the anger and hatred that inhabited me during those days. I am undecided whether I should keep them in my archives or dispose of them?

I am reminded of who I was, what my thoughts were, and what I was feeding my mind, and that has value. As Carl Jung wrote: “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

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345.2025

It has been five days, and I feel like I've done a good amount of organizing. What I have not looked into is simply archived for future me to once again curse my laziness of the past. Now that most of my data is organized, and redundant, I can continue reading the book, knowing that I conquered one of my Smaugs.