Preserving Memories the Right Way
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
| Month | # Pictures/Video | Size (MB) | Cumulative Count | Cumulative Size (MB) | S3 Cost (Monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov | 183 | 1,780 | 183 | 1,780 | $0.17 |
| Dec | 444 | 3,826 | 627 | 5,606 | $0.53 |
| Jan | 252 | 4,267 | 879 | 9,873 | $0.94 |
| Feb | 358 | 2,706 | 1,237 | 12,579 | $1.20 |
| Mar | 257 | 2,323 | 1,494 | 14,902 | $1.42 |
| Apr | 275 | 1,920 | 1,769 | 16,822 | $1.60 |
| May | 459 | 3,047 | 2,228 | 19,869 | $1.89 |
| Jun | 421 | 5,083 | 2,649 | 24,952 | $2.37 |
| Jul | 384 | 2,762 | 3,033 | 27,714 | $2.63 |
| Aug | 478 | 3,468 | 3,511 | 31,182 | $2.96 |
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.