Digital Decluttering: Documents Archive Complete (Premium)

I can’t believe I’m writing these words, but I have completely archived what was previously an enormous amount of digital clutter across OneDrive and my NAS. In doing so, I have reduced my OneDrive storage usage by over 160 GB, and I am seeing even bigger storage savings on my NAS. This is all very impressive, at least to me, but I’m even more amazed that this onerous task took under two weeks because parts of my documents file clutter had been sitting in OneDrive and on my NAS for literally decades.

Whew!

As you may recall,  I discussed my desire to declutter my physical and virtual “doom piles” back in May, after we had sold our house and moved to a nearby apartment. The physical half consisted of mountains of electronics and other physical items, and at least one bin full of paper photos, documents, and other items that needed to be scanned (and then sorted and archived digitally).

But by the time we got back from Mexico in early August, I was ready to take on the digital decluttering task, and I had over 250 GB of unsorted and unorganized documents and photos in OneDrive (and some unknown amount of digital clutter on our NAS, which had not been plugged in since the move). After evaluating the right starting point, I decided to start with the loose and unsorted photos and scans, which amounted to about 21.4 GB of files that I wanted to incorporate into my formal photo collections in OneDrive and Google Photos while deleting the duplicates and unnecessary files.

This process went better than expected, and that’s a key aspect to any initiative like this, as success inspires you to keep going: within two weeks, I finished the OneDrive photos decluttering process—that is, everything was sorted and organized and that 21.4 GB folder of clutter was gone—and so I turned my attention to the NAS by plugging it in for the first time in months, connecting it to the new network, and looking at the clutter there with fresh eyes.

It was predictably depressing: I found an additional 100 GB (!) of unsorted photos and scans (but hoped and expected that much of that was duplicates) and hundreds of GBs of documents and other files in my work archives, some of which were organized but would need to be cleaned up (and size-reduced, as I had been saving unnecessary videos and other large files for decades), and much of which was loose and unsorted in “to file” folders, the contents of which, like the loose photos and scans, would need to be integrated into my archives. (My main work archive is in OneDrive, but there is a copy on the NAS as well.)

I started with my Penton folder, which contains my work archives from 2012 (or so) back to the beginning of my career in the mid-1990s, and I was able to quickly lower the size of this folder from 118 GB to about 48 GB. Here, again, success kept me working on what is usually a boring and tedious task. Using offline versions of the OneDrive archive on a laptop, I cleaned, pruned, and organized, working my way through it all. I expunged tons of huge files, pulling aside videos so I could archive them on YouTube (which is free, bottomless, and public-accessible). I finally got it all to where I wanted it: better organized, smaller in size, and sustainable.

And then I took on the rest of the NAS and its 400 GB (!) of unsorted documents, photos, and other files. Here, I worked similarly to my earlier OneDrive-based efforts by copying chunks of this “to file” stuff to a laptop and organizing it there. I moved documents, photos, and other files into my (local) work archive and/or OneDrive (and Google Photos) photo collections as needed, pulled aside videos for YouTube as before, and deleted tons and tons of duplicates. I just kept working at it.

And today, that work is done. Yes, there is still work to do: I have about 1.9 GB of loose and unsorted photos and scans on that laptop’s desktop, but that’s a small slice compared to what I’ve accomplished so far, and much of that will end up being duplicates anyway. And, yes, the next step will be to go through the physical photos and documents in that storage bin and then scan and organize the resulting files. But my work archive, that massive body of documents and files dating back 30 years now, is complete. I’ve done it.

So what does that mean?

My Documents folder in OneDrive has five sub-folders: Archive, Book, Code, eBooks, and Work. Only two of those are important to me day-to-day—Book and Work—as they represent what I’m working on right now, my current books (mostly the Windows 11 Field Guide right now), the writing I do for Thurrott.com, and related things. The To-do folder in Work and the Book folder together occupy about 3.4 GB of disk space, and this is what I sync to each PC I use.

The Archive folder is what I just organized, and there’s a copy of this now on my NAS as well: it takes up about 200 GB of disk space. Inside, there are just four folders, all of which are archival in nature.

They are:

Books. This contains two folders, Field Guides (10.7 GB, containing the folders for all of my older Field Guide books) and Older books (4.5 GB, containing the folders for all of my older, paper-based books dating back to 1994).

Eternal Spring. I create a lot of visual assets for the YouTube channel my wife and I maintain, and this folder contains the older, no longer needed assets from older videos (and will likely be culled at some point: I keep the current assets in To-do in Work). It takes up 4.5 GB of space.

Personal. This new folder in the Archive folder contains my/our personal files, organized by year and dating back to 1993. It takes up 7.5 GB of space.

Work. This contains my work archives from 2011 to present, organized by year and then month, and that takes up about 118 GB of disk space. But as part of my organizational efforts over the past month, there are now two additional folders in there alongside the year folders: Penton and Websites. Penton is that archive I worked on first and it has all my Penton-era and earlier work documents is now about 53 GB in size because I moved more into it during the decluttering. And Websites contains multiple versions of multiple pre-Thurrott.com websites dating back to 1997. This uses just 3.6 GB of disk space and it’s a treasure trove of memories.

We’re away for the weekend as I write this, but when we get back I will upload the current versions of the Books and Websites folders to the NAS as I organized and de-duplicated those two folders during this trip. (This was the point at which I “finished” the archiving work.) Then, I will upload some subset of this—Penton, certainly, but perhaps also Books, Personal, and Websites to Google Drive and Microsoft 365 Business Basic, since I have 1 TB of storage in each and multiple archive copies is prudent. But the hard work is done.

I did much of this work using just File Explorer in Windows 11, though I noted in at least one article in this series how invaluable WinDirStat was for locating the biggest files in whatever folder structure and then deleting and or moving them aside (say, for upload to YouTube), dramatically speeding this process.

But my most recent work, which involved copying files from the NAS to a laptop to work on them locally (and then copying a subset of them back to the NAS to archive them) required another tool because this process was so slow. Worse, I was using a few different laptops, and some of them had the Windows Insider Program Beta channel version of Windows 11 on them, and that version of File Explorer is/was incredibly buggy and would hang and crash repeatedly, slowing my progress.

After a bit of testing, I settled on a tool called Directory Opus, which is old-school and even antiquated-looking but worked wonderfully. It has a nice dual-pane view (like File Manager from Windows 3.x) that proved ideal for my comparison needs when I was checking “to file” documents and folders against what was already in the archive. Using an Ethernet cable (as opposed to Wi-Fi) didn’t hurt either.

The massive number of “backups” I had from the mid-2000s—basically entire folder structures I copied up to the NAS before resetting PCs and starting over from scratch, many during the Longhorn/Vista era, required some optimization. Based on some feedback, I used a tool called Duplicate Cleaner Pro to ensure that files I assumed were duplicates were, in fact, duplicates. It was a bit complicated to use, but it helped.

In addition to being fully organized now, I’m also using much less disk space. I’m not sure how much space I saved on the NAS yet, as we’re away, but I had hit almost 890 GB (of roughly 1 TB) on OneDrive by the time everything was organized.

But with the duplication purges, I’m now down to 727 GB (!) of total OneDrive usage, a savings of over 160 GB. (And I’m no longer in danger of exceeding my storage limit there.)

Worth it? You bet. And this work is literally done: there is no more organizational work to do, and I can move forward with my current organizational scheme safe in the knowledge that it works for me and probably will until I’m done or gone. This is it.

But here’s the thing: I never thought I would reach this point, let alone reach this point in under one month or work. This hairball, this collection of unsorted messes of photos, documents, and other files, dating back decades and extended across both cloud and NAS storage, had been hanging over me forever. I knew I’d tackle bits of it from time to time, and I knew I’d make some progress each time, give up because it’s so tedious and unrewarding, and then let it sit for some number of years until I was inspired to tackle a bit of it again. And yet, that’s what happened. Somehow, miraculously, I just plowed through it.

I almost can’t believe that it’s done. I feel like I’m going to connect to the NAS or whatever and find some other folder of hundreds of gigabytes of crap to deal with. But … it’s not there. I know it’s not there. It just doesn’t seem real.

But it is real, and when we get back, I will duplicate those archives as noted. And then I’ll open that bin and see what loose documents, photos, and other items I have in there.

It’s time to start scanning again.