Cleaning up

We arrived in panama with two laptops and one portable hard drive, together providing 160 Gb of storage. The five year old laptop also contained a back up of the information from our even older desktop computer. (The latter was donated to a museum for their display of Stone Age office equipment before we left Mozambique) When our old laptop showed signs of an imminent crash, we copied the folder ‘my documents’ to the portable hard drive.

The remaining hard disc space had thus clogged up rather badly and I decided to see if I could clean up a little bit. Since there were back-ups nested in back-ups, I first hunted for duplicate files. Below follows a brief account of what I found:

In the folder ‘Back up Laptop’ I found a folder ‘Work Kees’. In this folder I found three folders named FAO 1, 2 and 3 (I had three contracts with FAO). Each of these folders contained a folder called ‘Proagri2’ of 34 Mb as well as reports from my colleagues Carol Djeddah and Paulo Israel. I had also started to collect useful back ground information about Mozambique in a folder. This folder also contained a folder ‘Proagri2’ and copies of the Djeddah and Israel reports.

Then I had a look in the folder ‘Back-up Desktop’. Lo and behold, I found the folders FAO1,2 and 3,complete with their subfolder ‘proagri2’ and the Djeddah and Israel rapports, as well as a similarly endowed folder with useful background information about Mozambique. Another folder on the portable hard drive was titled Mozambique and contained a folder named ‘Work Kees’. And, this is becoming somewhat repetitive, that folder contained the folders FAO1, 2 and 3 and a folder with background information about Mozambique. Each of these contained, you guessed it, a folder named ‘Proagri2’ and the reports of Djeddah and Israel.

Our portable hard disk thus contained 12 copies of the folder ‘Proagri 2’. Now we are talking about the five-year Agricultural Strategy documents for Mozambique, so it is important information, but I admit that twelve copies on the same drive is somewhat exaggerated. And now Loes tells me that there are probably a copy or two of the same folder hidden in her folders. This is worse than cleaning up your desk.