So, you’re asking about this ‘kim drive’ thing. It’s not some big company project or anything fancy you’d download from an app store. Nope, this was my own little adventure, or misadventure, depending on how you look at it.
It all started because I got seriously fed up. You know how it is with those cloud storage services? They lure you in, all simple and cheap, then BAM! Suddenly they’re shoving a million features you don’t need down your throat, the price quietly creeps up, and honestly, who even knows what they’re doing with your files anymore? I just got tired of it. I wanted something dead simple, something I controlled.
How this whole ‘kim drive’ mess began
I figured, how tough could it be, right? All I wanted was to keep a few folders synced between my main computer and my old laptop. That’s it. No fancy sharing, no versioning that goes back to the dinosaurs, just straightforward syncing. Famous last words, let me tell you.
So, I decided to build my own. I called it ‘kim drive’. Why ‘kim drive’? Well, my cat, Kim, was usually sleeping on my desk right next to the keyboard while I was wrestling with the code. Seemed fitting.
I started off just trying to figure out the basics. First, I poked around with some simple scripts. I’m not a professional coder, mind you. I just like to tinker and break things, apparently. I tried to get a script to just copy files from one place to another. That part was easy enough. But then came the tricky bits.
- Figuring out what files had actually changed.
- What to do if I changed the same file on both computers before syncing? That was a recipe for disaster.
- Making sure it didn’t just re-copy everything every single time and eat up all my network bandwidth.
Let me tell you, there was a lot of banging my head against the wall. I’d spend an evening thinking I’d cracked it, then the next day, poof, something would be missing, or I’d have two versions of a file and no idea which was the right one. I remember one particular evening, I was working on some important documents for a personal project, something I was really passionate about. I ran my latest ‘kim drive’ script, feeling pretty confident. Next morning, half the folder was gone. Vanished. My heart sank. I think I spent two days piecing things back together from scattered backups and old email attachments. My wife just shook her head; she was used to my “projects” causing minor chaos.
I kept chipping away at it, though. Little by little. I learned a bit more about how file systems flag changes, about timestamps, about comparing files. It was slow going. There were days I wanted to just throw the whole idea in the bin and pay for one of those expensive cloud services again. But I’m stubborn.
This whole ‘kim drive’ development saga happened during a pretty weird time for me. I’d just left a job that was burning me out, one of those places with endless meetings and processes that didn’t make sense. I had a bit of time on my hands before starting something new, and I think I needed a problem I could actually solve, or at least feel like I was making progress on, even if it was just my own silly file sync tool.
So, where is ‘kim drive’ now? Well, it’s still running. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of little scripts and brute-force logic. The “user interface” is just a couple of batch files on my desktop with scary-looking icons. It still throws a fit sometimes if I, say, rename a folder on one machine and forget to on the other before syncing. It’s definitely not something I’d inflict on anyone else.
But you know what? It does the job I built it for. It syncs my key folders. I know exactly how it works, every flaw, every shortcut I took. And there’s a certain satisfaction in that. It’s my clunky, imperfect solution, built out of frustration and a desire for something simple. And Kim, the cat, still sleeps on the desk next to it. So, I guess it’s a success in its own way.