Welcome to Track My Own Files

Track My Own Files is a Cross-Platform Open-Source File Tracking System designed to track files on active, inactive (removable), local and/or networked storage devices.

Why would this matter to me

  • Well, if you sometimes find yourself making backups of files either on the same machine, or on another machine, or on removable drives, and after a year, or even sometimes just a week, you finally find yourself not able to remember where you placed your backup or maybe even doubting if you had backed it up in the first place. Then this should matter to you.
  • Well, If you sometimes find yourself constantly running out of space, only to find that you have been keeping multiple duplicate files, regardless of whatever file type, on several locations on the same machine. Then this should matter to you.
  • If you are the type of person who shoots a lot of pictures or videos, and after consuming the whole capacity of the SD card would swap it with a new fresh one, and at the end of the day would copy the contents of the SD to a larger drive but leaves the original on the SD as backup. But after accidentally deleting or modifying the copy, would try to go through all of those backup SDs trying to find that one file. Then this should matter to you.
  • If you are the type of person that needs to constantly keep track if there are a sufficient number of backup copies across multiple machines and/or removable storage devices. Then this definitely should matter to you.
  • If you are the type of person that keeps track of a file’s file integrity via md5, sfv or sha1 to sha256 checksum. then this definitely should matter to you.
  • Well, If you sometimes find yourself suddenly loosing a storage device either due to file system corruption, viruses, drive failures, and have spent some time just agonizing in not knowing what was the contents and if there are any important files in there, or just want to know if there are still enough adequate number of backups, after such an event. Then this is definitely for you.

As I am still setting up the site, I will be creating a series of blogs to provide instructions on how to use the system.

What was the reason for creating Track My Own Files

I created this system because:

  • I too had suffered the loss of losing several Hard drives, and would even until now I would still wonder if the file(s) that I have been looking for was in that drive or not.
  • I too had been keeping track of file integrity, ever since I learned the CRC checks are not enough to verify if the backed-up file or disk is indeed still being read correctly or was downloaded correctly or had not been tampered with.
  • I too had come across the need to free up a lot of space by finding all those duplicate files caused by my eagerness to just backup the whole drive into a larger drive each time I would need to reinstall my machine again.

What was the reason for starting up a whole site

As I said before I have suffered, and maybe there are others who have also suffered as I have or maybe is still suffering. And just maybe this is what they need or maybe this could prevent such a loss. I honestly do not know, but what I do know is that this system had helped me a lot and I will continue to use it from now on.

Another reason is that in the next couple of blogs I will be teaching how to set all of this up (both client and server), but there are also those that will not be able to completely set all of this up (maybe just the client part) and that is okay, because once I could manage to squeeze in the time or even better if there will be a lot of demand for it, I could set up a Free Service. Which should be enough for those who would want to quickly try it out or even those who would actually just use it for their own personal use, for as long as I could manage to maintain it.

Of course, if ever I would make it to the point where I would deploy such a Free Service, there will be a reasonable limit. I apologize in advance but my resources are just finite and the Free Service will need to have a limit to avoid abuse or just to give others users a chance to use it with hopefully minimal degradation, but I will try to make the limit more than enough for the average user if I can.

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About Me

I’m a passionate but struggling developer.. My Interests nowadays are with Internet Of Things, Embedded Dev., Artificial Inteligence, Computer Vision, Robotics, Aquaponics, Micro-Service Architecture, and Self Sustainability. That last one ‘Self Sustainability’, is probably the real reason why I made this system. I just can’t simply rely on storing all my family’s Photos and Videos online, I just have to have my own copy just in case. And because of that I had to host my own cloud server at home, and the problem with cloud servers shared by several people (my family) is the ramphant duplication of files across multiple online and offline machines and storage devices. So that is why I created this system.