So, my digital life was a complete disaster. Seriously. Files scattered across three different external hard drives, stuff duplicated, photos mixed with work documents… you know the drill. Finding anything was like digging for treasure without a map. It just wasn’t working anymore. I kept hearing about fancy backup systems and cloud stuff, but I wanted something more hands-on, something I could control right here.
I decided to call my little project the ‘dillon drive’ method, mostly because my neighbour Dillon mentioned something similar he did, seemed simple enough. The core idea was basically one big drive for active stuff, and another for pure backup, with a very strict folder structure. Sounds easy, right?
Getting Started – The Cleanup
First step, I got myself a new big external drive. Nothing fancy, just a solid chunk of storage. Then came the hard part: sorting through the existing mess. Man, that took ages. I basically locked myself in for a whole weekend.
- Pulled everything off the old drives onto my main computer’s desktop (which temporarily became a new level of chaos).
- Created the main folders on the new ‘dillon drive’: Work, Personal, Media, Archive. Super simple.
- Then, file by file, folder by folder, dragged everything into its new home.
- Deleted so many duplicates. Found stuff I hadn’t seen in years. It was tedious, clicking and dragging, waiting for transfers.
Honestly, halfway through Sunday, I almost gave up. It felt like shoveling sand against the tide. Why did I even have six copies of that one blurry photo from 2015? No idea. But I pushed through.
The ‘System’ in Action
Once the main drive was sorted, I set up the second drive purely as a backup. I found some basic software, nothing complicated, just something that would copy the main drive over to the backup drive once a week. Didn’t want anything too clever that might mess things up.
Now, the routine is pretty straightforward. New files go directly into the right folder on the main ‘dillon drive’. Downloads folder gets cleared out regularly. Stuff I’m done with but might need someday? Straight to the Archive folder. The weekly backup runs automatically on Sunday nights.
Is it perfect? Nah. Sometimes I get lazy and just dump things on the desktop again for a few days. The backup software occasionally throws a weird error I have to figure out. And if that main drive fails between backups, well, I lose the latest stuff. It’s not foolproof like some expensive RAID setup or constant cloud sync.
So, Was It Worth It?
Yeah, I think so. It’s way, way better than the chaos before. I can actually find things now. It feels less… heavy. Less digital clutter weighing me down. It’s simple enough that I can actually stick with it, most of the time anyway. It’s not some high-tech miracle, just a basic process that forced me to finally get organized. And my neighbor Dillon? He just shrugged when I told him, said he just uses the cloud now. Figures.
