Digital Decluttering: For the Love of NAS (Premium)

As part of a grueling summer in concrete construction the summer after I graduated from high school in 1985, I built a wall. And not just any wall, but a concrete wall surrounding a field for horses that was molded using a Styrofoam “foam form” that would be covered in adobe stucco and required a two-foot ditch.

I recall surveying the area with my boss, who after that point was literally no help at all: I did the whole thing by myself. But I asked him how I should proceed. “Just start digging,” he replied. And then he got in his truck and drove away, leaving me there by myself in the hot Albuquerque sun.

So I started digging.

And that’s what this summer’s digital decluttering initiative has been like, a seemingly impossible mountain of a task with no clear place to start and serious concerns that I’ll ever finish it. But as was the case with that stupid wall that I’ll never forget, it turns out that this goal, to organize and archive my personal and work documents, photos, and other files, is a surmountable task. No, I’m not done yet, not even close. But I have made more progress than I had thought possible, and in under a month so far. And while I’m sure I will need a break at some point, and still have some photos and other items to scan, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I didn’t expect to post about this repeatedly midstream. But even since last week, there have been some interesting developments. And a more keenly felt need for a more modern NAS than the out-of-support WD MyCloud EX NAS I’m still using.

Let me address the progress bit first.

Today, my data is in three places. Photos in Google Photos. Personal and work documents and photos in OneDrive. And both are on my NAS, which has 6 TB of storage mirrored across two drives for redundancy and also contains other less essential music and video backups.

That last paragraph suggests some organization. And there is some. I consider the photo collection in Google Photos to be the definitive version of that set, and it’s my go-to when I need to find anything. But OneDrive (and the NAS) are similar backups with date-based organizational structures. And my personal and work documents were organized similarly, with my original organizational scheme running through 2012-ish, and my current (and superior, now date-based) scheme in place ever since.

The problem is that I was also disorganized over many years. I would scan in loose photos and other items in bulk quantities, set them aside in a “To file” folder of whatever kind, and then never sort through and correctly archive them. And under my previous document organization scheme, I’d often do the same with whatever collection of stuff was on any given PC. Every time I moved from PC to PC, or would reinstall Windows on the same PC, I’d backup these “To file” folders to the NAS and then never actually go through them and archive anything. The result, over many years, was a mountain of clutter.

What’s a mountain, you ask? Well, when I started this process in early August, I identified 250 GB of unorganized photos, documents, and other files in OneDrive that would need to be integrated into my organizational folder structure (i.e. “archived”) and/or deleted, pretty much on a per file basis. And on my NAS, there was almost 500 GB of unsorted files. The Penton folder (which contains my work archives through 2012) was 165 GB in size and the explicitly loose photos collection on the NAS took up about 100 GB. (This doesn’t account for the loose photos that are all over the rest of the NAS’s Documents folder, though.)And so I started with the high-value targets: the 21.4 GB of loose photos in OneDrive, which I sorted and organized over two weeks. And then the 165 GB of work archives (that Penton folder), which I downsized to 116 GB and then 48 GB.

Obviously, one of the key ways to downsize files is to locate the biggest files first and see whether you need them. And when I did this using WinDirStat,I found some obvious problems: huge video files plus disk images and executables. And so as I organized that folder using a locally synced copy, I opened File Explorer windows for all the folders containing problem files to determine whether to move or delete them. In the end, I deleted all of the executables, disk images, and similar files. But many of the videos I had kept were valuable, and some were leaked internal Microsoft videos or whatever that I did want to keep. And so I decided to archive them on YouTube, which is free, and would save me tons of space in OneDrive and/or the NAS. Better still, I can make this video archive available to the public as well, which I’ve done. So far, I’ve uploaded over 200 videos.

It’s much easier to work with OneDrive files offline, by syncing whatever folder structure to a PC so that you can simply copy, move, or delete as you would with any files on your PC. But the trick with OneDrive is that these files also have to be synced back to the cloud. And in making several tens of gigabytes of changes in OneDrive, I had a lot to sync. Unfortunately, my blazingly fast 1 Gbps Internet connection is dogged by a painfully slow 30 Mbps upload speed that is even slower over Wi-Fi and much slower over Wi-Fi when working from the bedroom, as I’ve done with that computer. And I eventually decided to move the laptop closer to the router, connect it via Ethernet, and let it bulk sync the remainder of the changes. It did the final 60 GB in a single day, though it did take the entire day. And then I selected each folder I had synced locally, right-clicked, and deselected “Always keep on this device.” Free at last.

With that done, my OneDrive archives are now in great shape. I have integrated the slimmer Penton folder and other NAS- and OneDrive-based data into my current organizational structure under Documents, and that system will last me for the rest of my life. (I have archives for books, personal , and work in there.) And I’ve integrated all the loose photos from OneDrive into my organized OneDrive photo collection. It’s all shiny and clean and exactly the way I want it. And it’s ready for whatever loose photos and documents I find on the NAS if they need to be integrated.

Which means that I’ve moved on to that horrible task.

On the NAS, I now have four main blobs of data in my Documents\Paul folder: _To file (which is all of those backups, loose files, and other detritus), Books (a version of the Books folder I have in OneDrive that will need to be consolidated), Penton (the original 165 GB version of my archive that I’ll be deleting), and Websites (a subset of my websites archives, which will also need to be consolidated and organized, first in OneDrive). Naturally, I’ve started taking on the biggest and most horrible of that data: my _To file folder, which is about 400 GB of stuff (roughly 453,000 files).

In keeping with my story about building a wall at the top of this post, I just dove in. From the same laptop, I used File Explorer to select what turned out to be about 60 GB of folders in the _To file folder on the NAS and copied them to the PC. This process took most of the morning, go figure, but what I’ll be doing later today and, no doubt, into the week, is working through that data much the same way I did with the other data I needed to archive. Not so much looking for the biggest files, though I will do that, but rather to look for data that isn’t in the OneDrive documents archive or photo collection. I will delete everything else—the duplicates and superfluous files—and see where this takes me.

This is an unknown, of course. But not for the first time, I’m reminded of the central problem I have with this NAS, which has been a problem since I got it, really: it’s too slow. And this is an even bigger problem now because I’m working with so much data. It’s just ponderous.

A newer NAS might be faster on the network, I guess, but the bigger advantage is that modern NASs support using remote desktop to access a lightweight Linux desktop on the NAS. That would let me triage files and do bulk deletions right on the device using a GUI. And that would save me a lot of time. Unfortunately, my NAS doesn’t offer that, so I have to access it via File Explorer, which is slow. (Or over a command line, which is unsuitable for this work.) There’s a web interface, but only for the admin console.

And so when this project is done, I’d like to get a new NAS. I’ve been leaning towards a dual-bay Synology NAS, probably a DiskStation DS223j. I’m not sure how much storage I’ll need, but I will figure that out using the current NAS once everything is organized and duplicated on that. And I can imagine duplicating this NAS in Mexico City and syncing between them, though that’s a concern for future Paul.

But I’m curious if anyone has advice regarding a NAS: I’ve done some research, of course, but I’m just not that familiar with what’s available today.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of organizing and archive work to do.

By the way, that wall I built? It’s still there, almost 40 years later. Here’s an image of it from Google Street View.