Ask Paul: April 21 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been a fairly normal week after a few months of uncertainty and change, so let's kick off the weekend with another round of great reader questions.
The coming OneDrive reckoning
jrzoomer asks:

Paul how do you manage your OneDrive 1TB storage? I’m like you and have many files and more than 1 PC and am finding it difficult. What files do you selectively choose to sync (or not sync) to conserve space, and also how you manage with every PC you have and/or move to, do you disable sync on some of those too?

Right now, I don't do much of anything to manage it, because I'm still under the 1 TB cap on my primary account. But I am getting close to that limit (892 GB of 1 TB), and OneDrive has occasionally thrown up a helpful reminder that I may want to buy additional storage. So I started looking into what I can do.

OneDrive on the web offers a view of the largest files you have (OneDrive.com > click on storage used > Free up space (OneDrive)), which can be useful. But you can also use File Explorer in Windows to see overall sizes for folders (Right-click, Properties). The "Size" (as opposed to "Size on disk") number is correct.

In my case, I see the following (ordered by size):

Documents: 428 GB
Photos: 396 GB
Videos: 49.6 GB
Music: 8 GB

The Documents folder holds my entire work archive (174 GB), a messy "_old" folder that needs to be sorted through (246 GB), and whatever else. The Photos folder contains our entire photo library of scanned and digital photos, generally pretty well organized (149 GB), a Camera Roll folder (239 GB), some older home movies (4.4 GB), and whatever else. I cleared out most of my videos years ago, but that now holds the Eternal Spring videos I posted to YouTube. Maybe that archive is not necessary.

What will likely be necessary is going through the weeds in Documents and Pictures, but that will be time-consuming and tedious. It's not something I look forward to.

Others have other options with OneDrive. If you are paying for Microsoft 365 Family, as I am, you have six accounts to play with, each with 1 TB of storage. And one strategy is to specify accounts for certain purposes. I could put all my photos in an account dedicated to that, for example. Theoretically: I have a wife and two kids all using Microsoft 365 Family, and my wife's parents. So that's the allotment of 6 accounts. But others should be able to take advantage of that.

Anyway, that leaves my final option as buying more storage. And I could buy up to 1 TB more storage if I wanted to. I don't. So I will need to start culling unnecessary files.

With regards to syncing, my overhead is low because of the way I manage this. I wrote about this recently in Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium), but the short version is that I basically sync two folders to every PC, basically. My To-do folder (1.4 GB), which contains articles and reviews I'm actively working on for the site, and my Book folder (1.4 ...