The Puzzle of Prioritizing 50 Years

This weekend wasn't about mantras or teachings. It was about something much less glamorous, and much harder to explain: the constant, small decisions that make me stop and question which direction to move in next.

Not every choice is this hard. Starting with the Neela Srsvati series felt like a clear, intuitive pull, I just knew that was the right place to begin sharing, it came to me in multiple avenues and accidentally through a senior student as well looking for an old tape from it! But figuring out where to put my hours and what to prioritize on the archiving side doesn't have that kind of clarity. It's a genuine puzzle.

Logically, the oldest formats should come first. Tapes degrade. Cassettes and camcorder tapes from the 70s, 80s, and 90s are the most fragile things I have, and every year that passes is a year closer to losing them for good. That should be simple. Start old, work forward.

This is only 1 of about 30 deep large boxes FILLED with materials

But it isn't simple, because some of this material has already been "digitized" by someone who also cared about trying to keep these recordings safe for future generations. However, what has been digitized and whether that means put on CD or a hard drive versus what has not is completely unknown! There are CDs- SO MANY CDs. Are those CDs already sitting on one of my eleven hard drives? I don't know. Are these tapes on one of those thousands of CDs? I don't want to spend hours transferring and cleaning up an audio tape that's already safe somewhere else, when that same time could go toward something that isn't preserved anywhere at all.

So then the question becomes: do I start with the eleven hard drives instead, just to see what's actually already there? That's its own mountain. Eleven hard drives of material is not a weekend project, or even a yearslong one - realistically, mapping all of it is going to take years by itself. Each hard drive holds 1-2 TB of data! Some of that is well labeled, some of it is redundant, some of it is missing context or only has a few classes out of a workshop- what do I do with that?

And then there are the SD cards.

I found about fifteen of these tucked into envelopes, each one holding video footage from around the 2017/2018 years. They have a title with some limited information, but really I have no idea if what's on them is already backed up somewhere in the eleven hard drives, or if they're the only copy of whatever they hold.

Each beautiful hand made envelope holds about 1-2 cards with 60ish videos on them. Is that material on hard drives? What about the thousands of CD's? I am not even addressing the thousands of camcorder tapes I have yet to even figure out how to digitize!

So that's where I've been, wondering if I'm about to duplicate work that's already been done with every move I make, trying to decide how to prioritize this monumental task.

A brief note on how I'm working through this: I'm getting more technologically savvy than I ever expected to be. This week I used Command Prompt, a real accomplishment for me, to generate a master list of every file across all eleven hard drives. It's not a perfect system, but it lets me cross-reference by rough date, so I can at least guess which files on an SD card might already exist somewhere on a drive. Then I have to actually watch both and confirm. AI has become something of a lifesaver here too, helping me think through labeling, organization, and spotting possible matches faster than I could alone.

Here's what that process actually looked like this week, using one SD card as an example:

AI helped me compare its contents against my master file list, I have an SD card that shows 7 Chakra class 2017 in NY, Nov 2017 Purification some god and goddess classes, 3BP only Sat, Sun and Monday morning classes it says, Full moon chant Part one and two. When I look at what is in the hard drives that might match titles or dates I find:

1. "7 Chakra Class" (NYC 2017): No match found anywhere across all eleven drives.

2. "God and Goddesses 2017": No match found anywhere.

3. "3 Body Purification 2017 Nov, Sat/Sun only": A partial, unclear match. There's a "3BP Oregon Nov 2017" and "3BP New Hope Nov 2017" on Hard Drive 8. Neither is labeled NYC, so if the envelope's session was actually recorded in New York, this may be a genuinely undigitized event we don't have anywhere else.

And then the detail that actually settled it: none of those hard drive matches are video. They're all audio, WAV or MP3 files. Everything on this SD card is video. Which means, no matter how close the dates line up, they are not the same recordings. Whether we have both audio and video of the same event somewhere is a separate question I still need to chase down. But at minimum, I now know this SD card is worth digitizing, it holds video we don't have anywhere else.

That's it. That's the whole discovery. One SD card- 15 or so more to go.

And even once a file is confirmed and ready to move, that's not the end of it, I need to listen and watch, edit, work on the audio quality which needs to be done manually and there is a limit to what I can do because the most important thing is to not destroy the mantras and sounds- that is NOT an AI job. Sometimes the hiss of the cassette tape is just the cost of the mantra.

Then, if I want to share about it now, not wait until a full workshop is made, there is the process of creating a blog post, editing a clip, posting it to social media and YouTube which is its own frustrating part of technology that takes way more time than it should!

Eventually we will need both a cloud-based backup and a serious large external hard drive, we don't want a mishap or a hard drive to stop working and lose the efforts! None of these steps take five minutes. They each take real sit-down hours, and they all come before a single second of footage reaches anyone.

It's a lot, I know I need a community, I need the ones who love Sri Shyamji and want his work to continue, who know how valuable it is, and who want it to reach future generations and their own future selves.

I know this post doesn't have a mantra or a teaching in it. But this, the debating, the cross-referencing, the watching-two-files-side-by-side-to-be-sure, the quiet math of what this actually costs, is most of what the work looks like. I wanted you to see it.

Thanks for walking through my day with me- next post will have a mantra I promise!

~Galeet