I did my partner a service by changing the painfully slow hard drive in her laptop for a solid state drive. I had made a similar change with my own laptop: installing Windows originally on the hard disk took three or four hours, but with the SSD I was finished in just 15 minutes.
However, her old drive had a capacity of 500 gigabytes whereas the new SSD had only 120. Since she works a lot with photos, all her files from the old drive would not fit on the new one. But, since she has a 1TB external drive on which they could easily fit, I assumed it wouldn’t be too much trouble to keep only the recent files she was most likely to use on the laptop, archiving the rest. I also thought the greatly increased speed and responsiveness of the SSD would more than make up for any inconvenience from relying on an external drive. But this was not how she saw it. Whatever sluggishness had existed with the hard drive, it had caused her no conscious bother. To her, my attempt to help had only made things worse, not better.
I mistook what was a priority for me, in using my own laptop (and when using hers), with what was a priority for her. And moreover, that things which I thought were trivial – like restoring various saved logins or redownloading desktop apps – were pointless and frustrating obstacles for her. I had been, in a word, inconsiderate.
To remedy this problem of storage I had two options: purchase a new larger SSD and redo the whole thing, or press forward with a plan that had been sitting in my mind for a little while of setting up a home file server on a Raspberry Pi. Given I could attach another old laptop drive to the Pi, this would be the cheaper option, whilst also allowing me to tinker (in theory) with the various backup and sync strategies I had been considering.
I have not, as yet, set up SyncThing or NextCloud or any of the other technologies I thought I might try. But I have set up Samba and the Pi shares the drive nicely, looking like just another folder on her computer. Perhaps I’ve finally managed to satisfy the user’s requirements.
(I should confess that in the process of deconstructing the laptop – a process I assumed I could manage impromptu – I missed two screws hiding at the back, under the rubber feet. By the time I realised something was not right and went to YouTube to see someone else do it properly, I had irreparably broken the fitting – this is the one in the corner, right amongst the power adapter, power button and CPU. It’s fine as long as you remember to hold the corner together as you open the lid. Anyway, this probably didn’t strengthen my claim to be making her life easier.)