Are you like me?

by Lady Lee 12 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Lady Lee

  I admit it. I save things. My most recent collection is digital files. I see something on the net and just have to save it. This is by far the most compact collection I have had (at one point I had about 750 books that filled a room with14 bookshelves full and then boxes of them stacked on top of the shelves)

  After being on the internet for over 10 years now I have quite a collection of digital files. But do you think I can find what I want when I want without inserting each one into the computer to check what's on it? Nope. No way. And you can only put so much on a piece of paper and inserting it into the jewelcae.

  Blondie says she has a great way of cataloguing her data. It seems to work quite well because she comes up with just what you want shortly after you ask.

  Well I have a solution for my indexing problem. I found a program called Visual CD

  Once the program is installed you insert a CD into your CD drive. Open the program and click on NEW. Find your CD drive in the list on your computer (mine is the I-drive but most people will have it labeled C or D (depending on how many drives you have on your computer.

  After clicking on NEW the program will search the CD and create a list of everything on that CD. It will prompt you to give the CD a name (I'm numbering mine starting with 0001 - the 000 helps keep the files in a numbered order) and it will ask you where you want to save your new .vcc file to go. I created a file on one of my other drives and named it "CD files"

  Once the file is created you can remove the CD from the drive and create another one and another and another - in my case I'll be doing this for a while.

  You can also create a file of My Documents or any other directory on your computer and update the files when needed

  You can also compare two files (handy because if you are like me you will save the same file more than once because you forgot that you already have it)

  And if you are like me sometimes you wish you could have a printed copy of your files which was a painstaking task to print out the title of each file into Word or other program

  I hope that you aren't like me when it comes to saving things but if you are, you might really like this little program.
• 

  Lady Lee

  I just went snooping around the website He says:

  Welcome to BooZet's Free Software website

  The purpose of this website is to share software which originally written by me. I made the software as a hobby so the software are absolutely freeware! Feel free to use and give the software to anyone you know. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy..

  I love freeware. No expiry date to deal with
• 

  dedpoet

  Thanks for that Lady Lee, it looks like a good site, so I saved it, and will explore it later.
• 

  Lady Lee

  I just looked at how many CDs I have that need to be catalogued

  161 CDs with data files (no wonder I can't find what I am looking for)

  39 CDs of music CDs
• 

  I quit!

  Sounds like something I need. I'll check it out.

  Thank you
• 

  Leolaia

  I have two 300 GB drives (both as backup of my HD) that I keep all my documents on. I have learned the hard way that CDs do not last and degrade over time; so I keep everything on an active drive. However, organizing the documents themselves is a very timeconsuming task. My folder with Watchtower materials (13 GB) has taken me months to organize, and I'm still not done yet. My folder of biblical scholarly articles (9 GB) is also not fully organized (and not yet complete), as I relabel every article with a systemized name that automatically sorts the articles by journal and author in a regular Windows folder.

  I am a packrat when it comes to keeping papers and mail and receipts, so for the past year I have been combatting that by scanning all this material and then throwing out the paper records (I'm engaged in this right now, going through all my 2006 papers). Then I just have the computer files of my papers, but that is just fine with me (as long as I don't lose that!), and it helps me manage my space, tho I still have many boxes of papers to go through (so far my paper records occupies only 1.45 GB)...
• 

  purplesofa

  Thanks Lady Lee,

  I am terribly disorganized on my computer........9,000 files of music 42.7GB

  I search forever for stuff

  I am going to try this program.

  Leolaia,

  I did not know that cd's went bad over time. Do you keep things on external hard drives?

  purps
• 

  Lady Lee

  Leolaia

  I used to leave things on my hard drives (2 but partitioned into several drives. The files were all stored on the second drive. I thought that if the main drive crashed at least I would have the files on the 2nd drive

  NOT!

  The last huge crash destroyed everything on both drives. Fortuneately I did have many things saved on CDs but a lot of things are gone forever
• 

  MsMcDucket

  161 CDs with data files (no wonder I can't find what I am looking for)

  I'm like that with my music CD's. If I don't mark it immediately, I'm sticking in CD after CD trying to find my song.
• 

  Leolaia

  My mom lost everything on her Mac because the drive failed....very bad experience.

  I have an HP computer that has a slot for an HP Media Drive, so I have two of them, one used as an external and one used as an internal that slides into the slot. I also have an older Iomega Drive that I store videos that are less important to me (e.g. I could lose them w/o too much trouble). So for the important stuff I have three copies of the files, including my computer's own hard drive.

  I could burn backups on DVD once I get things more organized. The important thing is to NOT use cheap CDs or DVDs for backups. Yes, CDs can expire. I had lots of data and music CDs from the late '90s that are now no good. The burning process uses pigments, and those pigments fade over time. You can prevent much of this by keeping CDs away from sunlight, but the same thing happened to CDs in a CD wallet that I kept locked up in a dark place, so that is not necessarily a preventative.