Digital Decluttering: Finish Work, Final Scans, and a Peek at the Future (Premium)

As you may recall, I wrote last week that I had essentially finished organizing and decluttering my documents archives. But at that point, it was only in two places, one temporary: OneDrive, and then the locally synced copy on the laptop I was using. So when we arrived home from our Labor Day weekend trip to upstate New York, I immediately connected my laptop to the NAS over the network, intending to (re)upload the now-final versions of the Books, Personal, and Websites folders I discussed finalizing previously. This would ensure that the completed archives were fully duplicated on the NAS as well. That is, the NAS and OneDrive would both have identical archives.

Unfortunately, as I went to do this, I noticed one last to-do task I had neglected somehow, an extra Books folder (taking up 68 GB of disk space) on the NAS that I had not copied locally to the laptop. (Which is a shame, as I almost certainly would have had time over that weekend to consolidate its contents into the master/organized new version of the Books folder.) So I worked on that first, whittling this behemoth full of now-superfluous videos and other large files, temporary output tests, and other miscellanea until it was about down to a more manageable 6.6 GB. Perfect? No. But better.

Then, I copied the contents from the extra Books folder (on the NAS) down to the laptop, integrated its contents into my local master/organized Books folder, and found that it was now about 18.2 GB in size (after a bit of further duplication removal locally). Not ideal, and probably a place to look at for future cuts. But good for now. And then I finally did what I had been waiting to do, and started copying all the folders I had finalized locally on the laptop (and synced to OneDrive) over the weekend—again, Books (18.2 GB), Personal (7.46 GB), and Websites (3.6 GB)—to the NAS alongside my archived Penton folder. All told, this archive is now just under 200 GB. Not bad in a world of 1 TB cloud storage allotments and much bigger NAS storage sizes.

With the file copying noted underway, I turned to my next decluttering to-do, which is a combination of physical and digital declutter. That is, I pulled my bin of documents, photos, and other items out of my storage shelf to see what was in there and thus what I needed to scan and then organize and archive. Fortunately, there wasn’t as much in there as I had expected. And so my initial reaction on first inspection was that this wouldn’t be too onerous.

We live in a small apartment, and I needed some space to sort through this—the living room is, um, occupied for now as described below—and so I carried the bin over to a bed and started pulling out its contents and arranging them in piles (photo scans, larger document scans, things to throw out, and so on).

And this confirmed my first impressions. Surprisingly, almost half of it could be tossed—there were lots of credit card offers and the like in there—while most of the rest of it looked straightforward. I threw out what I could, asked my wife to shred some of the documents that had personal information on them, and then I brought just a few piles of remaining “to scan” items—a few tickets and keepsakes, kids’ hand-drawn cards, maybe a few dozen loose photos, and so on—to the dining room table, where I had previously set up the NAS, a PC with display, a networking switch so each device was connected via a wire, and a few other things I’ve been using during this process.

It was time to start scanning. Or, it would be once I connected the HP all-in-one printer I intended to use to scan in these items. This bit did not go so well: despite being a fairly recent printer, the HP uses lackluster software (called HP Smart) for printing and scanning, and it’s not very efficient. I tried a few other software options, like Photoshop Elements and even the old Windows 8-era Windows Scan app you can still get in the Microsoft Store. But nothing did what I wanted.

Which is this: I want to place multiple items to scan on the scanner, have it scan the entire thing, and then have it save each item individually as its own file. But HP Scan never did this accurately—it usually would just cut out one of the items—and so I ended up doing the cutting and saving of individual files myself manually, in Microsoft Paint, which is actually pretty good for this work. Slow going, but it works.

While I mindlessly worked through this task, I was reminded of how I viewed decluttering—physical or digital—back in May when I first brought this topic up this year, and then again in early August when I actually started the digital decluttering work. Which is that you can only do so much before you get distracted by other things, or bored, and you just put it aside, sometimes for years. The paper scanning bit was so tedious, it threatened to undermine all the unexpected success I had made over the previous five weeks. And so I started to think about what other digital decluttering tasks I might complete in between doing the scanning. Maybe by mixing and matching, I could get through it.

And I came up with quite a few ideas. More than expected, in fact.

Home videos. I knew I had a collection of video tapes in a different storage bin containing home movies, plus a few similar items. But I also figured I must have the original recordings I had made at PDC 2003 and 2005 (now among the nearly 300 videos on our YouTube channel), and possibly the camera that I used to record them. Which meant that I could re-digitize it all, 20 years later, in better quality. (My original PDC 2003 video uploads are 320 x 240 resolution.) And so I looked. And sure enough, I do have that camera, which is MiniDV format, and all the tapes. And so I should be able to make that happen. (I also have several larger 8mm videotapes from an earlier camera, I assume, but I don’t have that camera. So I will need to ship them out to a service to see what’s on there and digitize them, I bet. I will ask a few relatives and friends first.)

Music collection. I was always a music fan, and so I moved from records (LPs and 45s) to CDs for prerecorded music and from cassette mix tapes to burned CDs and then DVDs for my own mixes, or what we’d now call playlists. I ripped my CD collection to disk at least four times—across MP3, WMA, and AAC formats—over time, and I have purchased an astonishing amount of digital music from every service that’s ever existed. It’s all on the NAS, and much of my legal purchases are in iTunes Match too. And so I decided I could do with the NAS-based music what I had done previously with my documents and photo archives and download them to a laptop, organize them into a single, clean collection with no duplicates or unwanted crap, and then re-archive it back up to the NAS. My Music share on the NAS is a bit over 100 GB, but I know there are a ton of duplicates and that it will be much smaller when I’m done. And so I downloaded it all to a (different) laptop and have gotten started on this project. I’ll write it up—and describe what’s in there—when I’m done.

Video collection. In addition to the home videos we have, which I consider part of our photo collection, I have a Videos share on the NAS that takes up about 1.8 TB of storage space and is thus both the largest and least-used location on there. Granted, most of that is low-quality, legally dubious DVD rips with the originals in storage, and perhaps it’s time to say goodbye to most of that. But there is also a terrific Mystery Science Theatre 3000 collection in there that consists of ripped VHS recordings I made in the 1990s (“Keep circulating the tapes”), plus a lot of legally purchased content I purchased from MST3K spin-offs like Cinema Titanic (now defunct), The Film Crew (now defunct), and Rifftrax. Like 187 GB worth. And so I went through that, organized as needed, and removed a few duplicates. I think that’s good to go.

Rethinking online accounts. This will definitely require an article of its own, but as I transitioned into owning Thurrott.com this year, I had to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work creating new accounts with our various service providers so I could move the site off of BWW. In doing this, I started thinking about separating church and state—er, work and personal—and given the domain name, that it probably made sense to use my Thurrott.com addresses for work and whatever Outlook.com/Gmail addresses for personal use. The problem is, I’d been using [email protected] for everything, including Google Photos, YouTube Music, YouTube, and more. And so that transition has begun. And you’ve perhaps seen the first change in that direction with the new YouTube Channel. More on that soon, but this ties into the new few items…

More photos. No, I didn’t find more photos to scan or organize, thankfully. Instead, I am adding Amazon Photos, which is surprisingly good and “free” because we pay for Prime, to the list of online photo storage services that I use (alongside Google Photos and OneDrive). I configured it to back up everything on my Pixel 7 Pro to see how it worked first, but I’ll be pushing my entire Google Photos collection there soon as well so it’s up-to-date. I’m also going to migrate from Thurrott.com (which is a Google Workspace account) to Gmail for my personal media, including Google Photos. So I will be writing about this stuff separately as well.

More music/videos. I’m also going to transition my personal YouTube Music/YouTube account to the same personal Gmail account. I’ve been experimenting with services that transfer playlists, as I use YouTube Music extensively. (And I will likely need to upload some small part of my local music collection to the new YouTube Music account since I have some music that’s not in the service.) But once I figure this all out, I will write about that as well.

New NAS. Based on all the feedback I’ve gotten on this topic, I will almost certainly be getting a Synology NAS of some kind late this year. I will wait until all these other tasks are complete, and will decide on the exact configuration at that time, while I keep reading up on this in the meantime. This isn’t definite, but I can imagine getting a second NAS for Mexico and keeping them in sync. But I don’t to get too far ahead of myself. There’s a lot to do before then.

So there you go.

For the short term, I will continue my document/photo scanning and archiving, and my local music collection archiving. But I’ll order some kind of a USB interface so I can get the content off those DV tapes soon, too, and I’ll research places to send the 8mm tapes. The online account thing is an ongoing process, too—I literally just migrated our website analytics account today, for example, and the Workspace to Gmail transition requires multiple steps and will take time. But it’s all happening.

The big thing, to me, is that the important archives—documents and photos—are “done,” save further replication. And because my current filing system has been in place since 2012 and has always worked well for me, and will certainly do so for the rest of my life, I can stop thinking about this stuff. My archives will be out there when/if needed and my current stuff is right where I want it thanks to local device sync. I’m good to go. What I’m doing is sustainable.

More soon.