Rebuilding the home media server

For years the family photo archive lived on three external drives and one very old laptop. This summer I finally moved everything to a small Linux box with two mirrored disks.

The hardware part took an evening. The software part took a weekend. The renaming took three weeks. Fifteen years of folders called New Folder (4), phone backup final and DO NOT DELETE do not sort themselves.

What finally worked was a dull rule: YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD place, nothing else. Anything that didn't fit went into a single unsorted folder that I promise myself I'll deal with in winter.

Lesson learned the hard way: make the backup before the clean-up, not after.