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...