The server is now back in the basement, happily humming along with a fresh copy of OS 10.7 Lion installed, the last supported version for that 14-year-old machine. I used an Other World Computing SSD drive and adapter to utilize the free SATA bus below the optical drive so that I could free up the fourth internal drive bay for storage. Over the last two weeks I’ve pruned and cleaned the music folder on that drive, removing duplicates, cleansing metadata, replacing old rips of my library with fresh, higher quality versions, and deleting stuff I’ve never listened to. Both my websites send their weekly backups to the email address linked to that machine. My entire photo library is pruned and organized by date. The home video library is organized by date in a separate folder on a separate drive—mostly videos of Finn, but some older stuff too—and the Movies have been reorganized.

It’s been a long project, but it feels good to have things done. Now I’ve got to get back to processing the balance of the slide scans I worked on in March.