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The AI cataloged 20 years of my backups. 8.1 million files.

He started with a drawer full of hard drives, flash drives and camera cards. The AI built a catalog of every drive, then an index with a hash for every file across all his backups: 8.1 million files, 3.6 million of them unique, going back about 20 years.

How it works

  1. Hands the AI his drives and cards
  2. It builds a markdown catalog of every drive
  3. It builds a SQLite index with metadata and a SHA256 hash for every file
  4. The index covers 8.1 million files across about 20 years of backups

Why it’s worth knowing

One run turned a drawer of mystery drives into a catalog of 8.1 million files, and showed that fewer than half of them were unique.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on bsky.app. See the original ↗

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