Found a carefully stapled together set of paper pouches containing DVDs, that have backups from the very end of 2007. This should be a chuckle.
My backup regime at the time genuinely consisted of "make a giant gzip-compressed tarball of my home folder, then split it into DVD sized chunks, burn it to disc, put each one in a carefully folded paper pouch, then staple the pouches together and label the outer sheet".
Which I find quite funny, because I can literally see the progression on the disc surface from "takes up 2/3 of a DVD" in April '07, to "Takes up 7/8 of a DVD" in June that same year, to "Takes up a full DVD" by the end of July, to "Two DVDs and a CD" in October, to "Two and 2/3 DVDs" in December.
I think by the next year, I'd given up on that and ... I'm not sure what I was doing at that point.
Well, I guess I'm calling an end to the Great Log Hunt. I feel like I've narrowed it down to there's about a 4 to 6 month hole in my memories that my irc logs don't cover, where I'd started spreading out on Furnet and exploring a few new places.
I have a very few logs from 2007, when I was using Kopete, where it looks like I was basically only in #vcl occasionally; and then the jump to 2009 where I'm using irssi and a regular in a few channels. But in the mid-00s I was switching clients, using webclients, all sorts of shit, and never thought I'd need to keep All The Logs; so now there's a lot of folks who are just very dim memories.
...
Maaaaan. This hurts, reading names of folks who are no longer with us. Some of whom are recent losses.
Fuck.
I'm gonna stop picking at that.