Digital Decluttering: Taking It On the Road (Premium)

As I wrote in Digital Decluttering: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned (Premium), I ran into multiple roadblocks while juggling far too many projects, so I scaled back my ambitions and came up with a slightly more reasonable goal: I would try to complete three specific final digital decluttering tasks before heading to Mexico City this coming Friday, October 13. (We’ll be there for three weeks during the second half of October and the beginning of November.)

Those tasks were:

• Completely re-upload and publish the ~300 videos to the Thurrott.com YouTube channel because I had previously published them to the wrong channel like a doofus.
• Finish organizing the photo and document scans that I had scanned in over a frenetic weekend in mid-September and sync them to all versions of my personal document archives and photo collection.
• Combine the photo collections in Google Photos and OneDrive/NAS into one true collection and then sync it everywhere because my Google Photos collection was not as complete as I had thought.

And I did pretty well overall, though I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t have time to get it all done given the time commitment that each requires.

I am happy to report that the YouTube upload/publishing job is now complete, and you can view the results at the official Thurrott.com YouTube channel, where you will find many organizational playlists our entire First Ring Daily episode catalog, and a lot more.

I have made progress with but have not completed the scanning organizational task, but I did get about one-third of it done, and those finalized scans have synced to all versions of my personal document archives and photo collection.

And … I have made absolutely no progress on the photo collection work because it is a daunting process that involves several hundred gigabytes of what is inarguably my most important data.

Given all that, I have of course adjusted the schedule. And now I’m going to try to make some progress on those two unfinished projects in Mexico City while also uploading the (small) remainder of my video archive to the correct channel for the first time. And do all that while working to update the Windows 11 Field Guide for Windows 11 version 23H2, work that will take precedence over my digital decluttering stuff. But I’ll do some of each.

Each of these requires a bit of logistical work.

I already neatly organized my document archives and photo collection in OneDrive as part of all that digital decluttering work I did between August and September. Since then, I ran into some new OneDrive issues in Windows 10 version 23H2, which I’m using across multiple PCs so that I can work on the book, and so I took the scary but very successful step of reorganizing all of my OneDrive folders. So I’m in good shape there.

To do the existing scan organization work, I use a folder called 2023-09 final scans in the root of my Photos folder in OneDrive, and I sync that to all my PCs (it’s about 1.8 GB, with over 1800 files) so that I can work on it from anywhere at any time. So that’s all set and it’s already synced to the PCs I will bring to Mexico.

I had uploaded most of my video archive before I realized my mistake, and since then I did the work to get them on the right YouTube channel. This involved downloading them from the wrong channel using Google Takeout, (re)uploading them to the right channel over four days because of YouTube upload limits, and then adding the correct titles and descriptions before republishing them one by one. And yeah. That took a while. But thanks to a busy couple of weekends and a mad dash last night, I finished this work last night at midnight. So the only thing left is to make sure that I have the remainder of the video archive—the videos I hadn’t yet uploaded—with me in Mexico so I can upload the rest of the videos there. (I have also temporarily hidden the videos on the wrong channel and will delete them for good soon.)

And that’s tied to that final item. The big one.

Once I cleaned it up, the Google Takeout download of my Google Photos collection took up about 550 GB of disk space. But I also must combine it, somehow, with my OneDrive photo collection, which is about 175 GB (and doesn’t include the 252 GB of photos in my OneDrive Camera Roll folder, which I’m going to leave as-is). Basically, I needed a place where I could work with up to 725 GB of photos, though there will be lots of overlap and I’m hoping the final size of the combined collection is much smaller.

At home, I have a few PCs with very large hard drives that can accommodate this type of thing. (I originally intended to do this work on one of them, in fact.) But this is a little more complicated on mobile PCs. Yes, I do occasionally get laptops with lots of storage in for review, but that’s not the case right now. And so I ended up buying a 1 TB Samsung T7 external SSD (USB 3.2 Gen 2-based) from Amazon. I copied the Google Photos Takeout files to that drive, and I synced my OneDrive photo collection to one of my laptops. And I will do the work to combine these things on the external SSD to ensure that I don’t screw up my OneDrive photo collection.

Since this drive has a reasonable amount of storage, I also copied the remainder of my video archive to it. That takes up less than 6 GB of space, so no worries there: I’ll get those files uploaded and removed from the SSD before I begin my photo collection work.

I’m going to need some tools to do this job correctly.

Key among them is something that will organize my Google Photos collection in a manner similar to how I do things in OneDrive. Right now, it’s organized into folders like “Photos from 1973” with no subfolders at all. But I want this organized into date-based folder structures that take this form: Year > Event where “Year” is like “1973” and Event is like “1973-02-04 Cheryl’s birthday.” I’ve found and paid for a utility that does this and while I’m not quite happy with it, it may be enough. (I’ll report back.)

I will also need to use the duplicate file utilities I found during my previous decluttering work, like Directory Opus and WinMerge. Obviously, the more I can automate this, the better.

Again, this is daunting, but it’s also detail-oriented. So, I will experiment on subsets of the collection first to help ensure I don’t screw anything up.

And yeah, I’m going to be pretty busy in Mexico City. Which is fine: I do some of my best work there. So I’m hoping I can get a lot of book work done and make more progress finishing up the digital decluttering tasks in those three weeks. Because when we get home on November 7, we have less than two weeks before we move (on November 18) into our next place, a nearby condo we’re renting. And that’s when I’m going to tackle the additional paper-based scans I discovered when we started cleaning up for the coming move, plus some other lingering related tasks. It never ends, I guess, but I’m incentivized to get on top of this stuff once and for all. It’s going to happen eventually.