Asklemmy

44142 readers

989 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What's the oldest thing in your downloads directory and how old is it? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 4 months ago by riskable to c/[email protected]

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I make 1 to 3 "monthly" backup folders, where everything I've downloaded that hasn't been moved to a home goes into 2024 August Downloads

I think I have back to 2021.

Still use them fairly often, lol.

[–] riskable 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ooh this is a good idea! Because when you extract a file you just downloaded the original creation/modification dates are preserved. So when you extract some tarball the directory my be from several years ago so you can't rely on file modification times to see when you downloaded any given thing.

I think I'm going to start doing the date directory thing! I'll start by writing a bash script that runs in a systemd timer that automatically creates a directory whenever the month changes 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I also like doing it this way because then I'm my own archive of old software installers. So if a new version comes out busted, run the old installer! Doesn't always help if it's internet connected, but it's nice to have something.

And I think even my vast amount of history is maybe only 100GB on my backup HDD, if it's larger it's from occasional random large files lol.