Cleaning up my network.....

I am trying to consolidate my hardware and virtualize as many of my physical machines as I can right now. I am doing this because I want to be green, I want to keep my basement cool in the summer, and I want to simplify things. That last item is top priority actually. I have terabytes of drives scattered across a dozen computers and I would like to gets rid of the old drives that are grinding away and move as many of the remaining drives to storage servers.

I am finding this to be a more difficult task that I first realized.

Ever since Windows Desktop search came around in Windows XP, I have pretty much tossed directories and files around willy nilly without much regard to where and how they are organized. I have relied on search to find what I need when I need it. The downside to this is that I have lots of duplicate files and I am not exactly sure what is backup up and where.

This morning I started tracking down old stuff I don't need any longer and duplicated data. I just deleted a directory that freed up 85 gigs on one of my storage servers because I had a copy of it as well as a recent backup of it elsewhere.

....and that was after only 10 minutes of poking around.

I am going to keep a running count of how much data I delete today and will post the results later....

 

Cheers!