Digital Decluttering: Documents Archive Complete (Premium)

I can't believe I'm writing these words, but I have completely archived what was previously an enormous amount of digital clutter across OneDrive and my NAS. In doing so, I have reduced my OneDrive storage usage by over 160 GB, and I am seeing even bigger storage savings on my NAS. This is all very impressive, at least to me, but I'm even more amazed that this onerous task took under two weeks because parts of my documents file clutter had been sitting in OneDrive and on my NAS for literally decades.

Whew!

As you may recall,  I discussed my desire to declutter my physical and virtual "doom piles" back in May, after we had sold our house and moved to a nearby apartment. The physical half consisted of mountains of electronics and other physical items, and at least one bin full of paper photos, documents, and other items that needed to be scanned (and then sorted and archived digitally).

But by the time we got back from Mexico in early August, I was ready to take on the digital decluttering task, and I had over 250 GB of unsorted and unorganized documents and photos in OneDrive (and some unknown amount of digital clutter on our NAS, which had not been plugged in since the move). After evaluating the right starting point, I decided to start with the loose and unsorted photos and scans, which amounted to about 21.4 GB of files that I wanted to incorporate into my formal photo collections in OneDrive and Google Photos while deleting the duplicates and unnecessary files.

This process went better than expected, and that's a key aspect to any initiative like this, as success inspires you to keep going: within two weeks, I finished the OneDrive photos decluttering process---that is, everything was sorted and organized and that 21.4 GB folder of clutter was gone---and so I turned my attention to the NAS by plugging it in for the first time in months, connecting it to the new network, and looking at the clutter there with fresh eyes.

It was predictably depressing: I found an additional 100 GB (!) of unsorted photos and scans (but hoped and expected that much of that was duplicates) and hundreds of GBs of documents and other files in my work archives, some of which were organized but would need to be cleaned up (and size-reduced, as I had been saving unnecessary videos and other large files for decades), and much of which was loose and unsorted in "to file" folders, the contents of which, like the loose photos and scans, would need to be integrated into my archives. (My main work archive is in OneDrive, but there is a copy on the NAS as well.)

I started with my Penton folder, which contains my work archives from 2012 (or so) back to the beginning of my career in the mid-1990s, and I was able to quickly lower the size of this folder from 118 GB to about 48 GB. Here, again, success kept me working on what is usually a boring and tedious task. Using offline versions of the OneDrive archive on a laptop, I cleaned, pruned, and organized, ...