Digital Decluttering: Back in the Saddle Again (Premium)

Back in May, I wrote about some of the decluttering work we did when we sold our house and moved into an apartment, and while I noted that there were lingering physical items to declutter, I omitted two important and onerous additional tasks I still need to perform as well. Both are related to digital decluttering.

This topic came up separately in the July 21 edition of Ask Paul (look for the "Digital hoarding" section), in which I discussed having over 250 GB of documents and photos in OneDrive that need to be triaged, organized, and/or, where possible, deleted. But OneDrive is only part of the problem: I also have files on my NAS, which is currently disconnected from the network, that I need to go through, organize, and push into the cloud where needed.

Where to start?

The two main buckets here---physical and digital clutter---are often intertwined, such as when I need to scan a photo or document and then organize and store it in the cloud. But neither is more important than the other, and both need to be addressed. And now that we're home from Mexico City for a few months, the time feels right. And so I started by assessing what I need to deal with.

On the physical front, I have at least one bin in my storage shelf that is full of stray photos, documents, newspaper clippings, kids' drawings, and more, just sitting there in a pile. These will need to be scanned using a flatbed scanner, and I kept an HP all-in-one printer that I'd otherwise not need for just this purpose. And so today I spent an inordinate amount of time just getting that printer, a three-year-old HP Envy Pro 6400, configured for our new (to it) wireless network and updated with the correct drivers. I won't bore you with the details, but this process went slowly and failed several times before I finally got it up and running.

On the digital front, I have three main areas to investigate: my OneDrive-based documents (which is the biggest and perhaps messiest collection), my OneDrive-based photos (loose, unsorted scans mostly), and my NAS-based files, whatever they are. (I haven't put this thing on the network since we moved.)

Long story short, I decided to start with the photos, because they are in many ways the most important and because this seemed like a good way to make some progress. These photos took up a total of 21.4 GB of space when I started the process, all stored within two folders inside of my "Photo collection" folder in OneDrive\Pictures.

First, I synced those two folders locally to a PC with a lot of storage so that I could work with them offline.

When that was done, I created a new folder in the root of my OneDrive Pictures folder called "_Master scans to sort." And then I moved the contents of those two folders into that new folder. No good reason, I just wanted a single place for all the misfit photos and scans, and I wanted it out of my Photo collection folder.

With that done, I can go through the folders and images in ...