Digital Declutter: Finish Work, Final Scans, and a Peek at the Future (Premium)

As you may recall, I wrote last week that I had essentially finished organizing and decluttering my documents archives. But at that point, it was only in two places, one temporary: OneDrive, and then the locally synced copy on the laptop I was using. So when we arrived home from our Labor Day weekend trip to upstate New York, I immediately connected my laptop to the NAS over the network, intending to (re)upload the now-final versions of the Books, Personal, and Websites folders I discussed finalizing previously. This would ensure that the completed archives were fully duplicated on the NAS as well. That is, the NAS and OneDrive would both have identical archives.

Unfortunately, as I went to do this, I noticed one last to-do task I had neglected somehow, an extra Books folder (taking up 68 GB of disk space) on the NAS that I had not copied locally to the laptop. (Which is a shame, as I almost certainly would have had time over that weekend to consolidate its contents into the master/organized new version of the Books folder.) So I worked on that first, whittling this behemoth full of now-superfluous videos and other large files, temporary output tests, and other miscellanea until it was about down to a more manageable 6.6 GB. Perfect? No. But better.

Then, I copied the contents from the extra Books folder (on the NAS) down to the laptop, integrated its contents into my local master/organized Books folder, and found that it was now about 18.2 GB in size (after a bit of further duplication removal locally). Not ideal, and probably a place to look at for future cuts. But good for now. And then I finally did what I had been waiting to do, and started copying all the folders I had finalized locally on the laptop (and synced to OneDrive) over the weekend---again, Books (18.2 GB), Personal (7.46 GB), and Websites (3.6 GB)---to the NAS alongside my archived Penton folder. All told, this archive is now just under 200 GB. Not bad in a world of 1 TB cloud storage allotments and much bigger NAS storage sizes.

With the file copying noted underway, I turned to my next decluttering to-do, which is a combination of physical and digital declutter. That is, I pulled my bin of documents, photos, and other items out of my storage shelf to see what was in there and thus what I needed to scan and then organize and archive. Fortunately, there wasn't as much in there as I had expected. And so my initial reaction on first inspection was that this wouldn’t be too onerous.

We live in a small apartment, and I needed some space to sort through this---the living room is, um, occupied for now as described below---and so I carried the bin over to a bed and started pulling out its contents and arranging them in piles (photo scans, larger document scans, things to throw out, and so on).

And this confirmed my first impressions. Surprisingly, almost half of it could be tossed---there were lots of credit card offers and the like in there---while most of the re...