I was working away happily this week on my Ansible scripts, testing them with Vagrant VMs when all of a sudden Vagrant wouldn’t create new VMs for me. I discovered the problem was that the 256GB SSD on my laptop was filled with photos and videos.
I regularly take photos, with both a camera phone and a DSLR but, ever since my daughter was born, my wife and I (mostly my wife cough cough) have been taking an enormous amount of pictures. It wasn’t until my hard drive space was at 90% that I realized that I have a data growth problem on my hands which is going to cost me an increasing amount of time and money to manage correctly.
The Stats
As you can see, after only 10 months I have accumulated 3,511 picture and video files, consuming a whopping 31GB of disk space. Using S3 to store this entire set will cost $2.96 per month. That doesn’t seem like a lot now but the costs and disk space requirements will only increase over time, at an average rate of 3GB and $0.29 per month, respectively. Expanding that over a year and I have $3.50 per month that I will pay…forever. I can’t even begin to imagine the pictures that I will need to sort through and potentially never view because there are so many of them.
The Plan
I need to come up with a plan to effectively manage the data growth in photos and videos coming into my household. I’m resigned to the fact that I cannot stop the files from coming in, so I need to manage it in a scalable and cost-effective way.
I have created a project on Github to track the progress of this data management plan, and I am making it public so that anyone with the same problem as me can find some success with it.