21.09.2022 Storage problems.

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Wednesday 21st 37F. It looks clear with stars and the moon visible. Brightening in the NE [at 6.10] Another sunny day is promised. Not only am I heating the house free of charge but I washed and dried most of the laundry. Up at 5.30. I was sweating under the winter duvet. 63F upstairs this morning.

Wednesday is farm museum day. We have been building an extension to the machine house.

My SSD is full to the brim with pictures. I was going to fit a bigger SSD but have lost my external drive housing. I have searched everywhere but without success. I know I had it not long ago because I updated my laptop with two, bigger SSDs. Now I am wondering if I left the housing in the laptop. My PC didn't have any extra M2 slots either. Cheapskate manufacturers!

 I fitted a second SSD after removing the disk drive tray in the laptop. Without the external housing I can't transfer W10 to a new [internal] SSD. Though I could use an external SSD via USB3 and WintoUSB software. Or, I could transfer my pictures to the external SSD to free up a load of space. I'll have to check what's on the external SSD. I daren't plug it into the PC in case it tries to update it all to the existing drive! My Pictures file amounts to 151GB, 28,000 files in 575 folders! That's only the most recent images. Stored since I bought a new PC a couple of years ago when the old one filled up.

 I transferred the Pictures folder to the external SSD. Then discovered it had completely ignored 2022. It was lucky I hadn't deleted the files on the PC. I am now using Copy and Paste. So now I will have hundreds of GBs of duplicates! 

 There was another strip of mist across the landscape again this morning. I finally met the neighbour with the dog. The dog was free. So we met each other physically for the first time ever. It became quite excited. Very well behaved and trained to obey. The dog, not me. Nor the neighbour. Who spoke excellent English. 

 I spent the day at the museum helping to erect a heavy timber framework. Intended to expand the [agricultural] machine house a little distance from the main buildings. Heavy, 6"x6" [150x150mm] sawn finish timbers are being used for uprights and lintels. The rafters are 50x150mm. Not intended to be a facsimile of an original building but in the same spirit.

 Professional builders are being employed to repair part of the original barn and lower the very uneven and crumbling floor. Sections of the original brickwork were bursting from between the timber framework. Making it very unsafe and unstable.

 Each beam was numbered before being removed and set aside for safety.  Lots of steel, screw props were employed to support the ancient roof. Some of whose timbers are believed to date from the 1400s. Recycling was commonplace when long and expensive timber was required for agricultural buildings. Easily confirmed by all the [empty] redundant joints on the towering posts. The main structure "only" dates from the 1700s. 

 I should have taken a photo, or three, but there were several carpenters present. Photographs of workers was commonplace in the past. However I did not want to embarrass them by inclusion without their express permission beforehand.

 Following this morning's moan about full storage I now have an external SSD drive full of duplicates. After a bit of online research I downloaded Visipics. This is a free, duplicate file finder. I told it to scan the SSD for duplicate images and left it to play. Much later it is still working through the 28,000 images. 

 I feel safe in deleting duplicates from the external SSD because they still exist on the internal SSD in the PC. I have a feeling it may be running all night! 

 There are large, orange balls of cotton wool crossing my view from my dormer/computer window. I will now have to think about choosing dinner. Salad I think.

 Visipics didn't take very long to finish. I deleted 25GB of duplicates from the external SSD and then deleted all images from 2021 from the PC. Problem solved.

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