Digital Decluttering: Tackling the Document Archive (Premium)

Over the weekend, I was able to dramatically reduce the file size of my pre-Thurrott.com archives, which dropped from 116 GB to about 48 GB.

At a high level, this work resembled what I did with my loose photos and scans: I assessed what I had, volume- and organizational-wise, and then decided where to start. This was an even more daunting task with the documents archive because it contains an incredible volume of personal and work-related documents and other files and, inevitably, even more photos and images to organize and archive. And it is spread out over two locations, OneDrive and my NAS.

With the loose photos and scans work, I had worked in OneDrive by collecting everything into a central (master) folder of that material, syncing it offline to a PC, and then working with the files locally in File Explorer. But after reconnecting my NAS to the home network last week and assessing what I had and where, I decided to copy part of my NAS-based documents archive to the same local PC to work with that locally at an acceptable rate of speed. (Working with the files directly on the NAS is very slow.) But of course I had to start somewhere.

On my NAS, we have user-based folders (like "Paul") under Documents. And my "Paul" folder contains several sub-folders, including "_To file" (a massive collection of folders and files that needs to be sorted through), "Books" (backups of my more recent older books), "Other documents" (which includes, among other things, our personal documents archives from the 1990s, including my oldest books), "Penton" (literally my work archive from the 1990s through 2012), "Text files" (mostly out-of-date), "Travel" (mostly out-of-date), "Visual Studio Projects" (out-of-date), and "Web sites" (an archive of sites like the Internet Nexus, Thurrott.com when it was a personal site, and a few other things). "_To file" takes up 835 GB (with over 554,000 files and 30,000 folders!) and the rest (minus "Penton") is about 83 GB.

"_To file" is going to have to wait and, boy, am I not eager to figure that one out. But two items stood out to me here as places to start: that personal archive (about 8 GB) and Penton (116 GB). So I copied each folder to a different PC to get to work, with the initial goal of just going through each and, where necessary, reorganizing. For example, with the personal archive, I wanted to get my old book files into a more central location so that all of my book files are together (and in multiple places). That was straightforward. But the Penton archive was a lot more complex. And much bigger.

The first step was to organize and clean up the folders first, reorganizing the top-level structure. It has looked like this since 2012 when I finally moved on to my current document archiving structure:

It's a bit busy and disorganized, but the real mess---and the real volume of files---is in that "SuperSite" folder, which became a dumping ground for most of my document archives. (99 percen...