Virtual spring cleaning

I had three external 3.5" HDD with capacities of 1.5TB, 1.0TB, and 0.75TB respectively. The 1.5TB HDD was filling up and it was starting to show erratic behaviour, like disconnecting by itself when I am transferring animes in halfway, so I decided to quickly get a new HDD before something happens and I regret it for the rest of my life. Well, at least for a few weeks of my life. 

So a few days ago, I got a 3TB Western Digital external HDD at Challenger for $207. Hmm, this HDD alone is already the equivalent of all my current HDDs combined. I sat down and started transferring animes to my new HDD, and after a few hours, it... disconnected by itself. 

This time, I had my suspicions. My 0.75TB HDD had showed the same symptoms before, although at a much lower frequency. So I guessed that the culprit is the USB hub I used to connect these HDDs, and after removing it and plugging my HDDs to my iMac directly, voila - they all worked perfectly fine. *touch wood*

After copying all my animes into the new HDD, I realised that I still had a lot of space. So I selected some anime series to backup into the 1.5TB HDD (My anime library is actually 1.86TB, so if I were to back it up entirely, I would need to buy another HDD), transferred my photos and some other files into my iMac directly (instead of keeping them in one of the HDD), and did some basic spring cleaning, deleting files I would not be using. 

This resulted in freeing up the 0.75TB and 1.0TB HDD, so I am going to try and sell them for a quick buck. My desk now looks less cluttered too. 

With so much extra space, I decided to try out the Time Machine, a backup utility by Apple. What Time Machine does is that it captures the most recent state of your data. This allows you to restore any file, or even the whole system, across various time periods. For the past 24 hours, Time Machine makes hourly backups. For the past month, it stores daily backups. And for anything beyond that, it saves weekly backups until the HDD runs out of space. 

The size of my system backup is around 326GB. My backup HDD still has almost 800GB available, so it's not an issue. Along with the 700+GB of space available in my iMac and another 1.2TB of free space combined across the two external HDDs, I hope I won't need to buy a new HDD anytime soon.