Happy Tuesday, everyone!
As usual, here's my latest progress report on personal archive cleanup:
- Week: Q1/2025, Week 7
- Files deleted: Some large-ish number
- Files triaged: 1,146,953
This past week, I finished pulling in everything I could think of, including all the stuff I'd neglected on the old Synology NAS and a set of files from a laptop that I'm planning to sell. That laptop is where the "some large-ish number" came from, because I don't know an exact count. After backing up the important things, I completely wiped and reset the whole machine. I'd estimate that operation cleaned out at least 200k-300k items, though most of them were operating system and application files.
I think the collection and triage phase is finally complete, which means I can take stock of the entire massive archive and begin the de-duplication process. I'll get into that next week; the first duplicate search will probably take multiple days to complete. In the meantime, I want to talk through the practical aspects of what comes next.
Planning an Archive Structure
One of the biggest practical challenges of dealing with a massive amount of data is that you have to decide what to do with it all. It's inevitable. Otherwise, what's the point? A giant pile of messy data is only marginally better than a dozen smaller piles of messy data.
Since the task of organizing a million or more files is already daunting enough, the last thing you want is to have to ask "what do I do with this?" over and over and over as you attempt to work through your collection. But unless you already know exactly what's in your unorganized archives, it's almost impossible to predefine a perfectly comprehensive framework for everything--a set of digital buckets that will hold all of your data in logical, intuitive ways without either too much or too little compartmentalization.
The best solution I've found is to employ a blend of pre-planned structure and flexible sorting. Define the big, obvious categories ahead of time, but let the details work themselves out organically as you process all your data.
This approach has two advantages:
- It points you in the right direction when sorting each new item, giving you momentum without additional work.
- It avoids wasted time and effort building out organizational structure for things that might not need any.
One of the tenets of Tiago Forte's PARA method is that you should never create a folder (or any organizational hierarchy branch) unless you have something right now that needs to go in it. That's enforces only and exactly the structure you need, or at least what demonstrably has value.
But even with this in mind, where do you start? What do you want your "fully organized" archive to look like? There are many approaches, all of which are valid and practical while also being mutually exclusive. It depends a lot on how your brain works and what you hope to do with the finished product.
In most cases like this, you don't intend to access or use the data on a regular basis--that's why it's in an archive, after all. Instead, you'll only want to find things in the archive infrequently and at unpredictable times. Therefore, in order for a well-organized archive to have practical value to you, it must be easy to find what you need, when you need it, as quickly and intuitively as possible.
The "intuitive" part means your organization structure is extremely subjective. It might look like mine, or it might be totally different. There are many high-level ways to categorize things. For example:
- By time, based on when you created or obtained it
- By owner, based on who created or is responsible for it
- By subject, based on what kind of information is contained in it, such as "documents," "music," and "source code"
- By major periods of life, such as "childhood," "high school," "college," and "adulthood"
- By major areas of life, such as "school," "hobbies," "family," "work," and "research"
Which methods are relevant to you depend on how you use technology and how you think about data. Generally, an effective organization scheme will be some blend of categorization. For instance, you might organize all of your photos strictly by time. You might organize your movie collection by genre. You might organize your music collection by artist. You might have a lot of business-related material that you organize first by employer (or client) and then by project. You might have a school folder that is subdivided by major educational windows (elementary, middle, high, college) and then by year.
My recommendation to employ a blend of pre-planned structure and flexible sorting means you should figure out ahead of time what you want the high-level organization to look like based on what you know to be included in your archive. Create folders outlining just that much structure in your target backup/archive location, then start moving files into it. Only then should you create deeper organizational structure, as you encounter a need for it.
During the process, you'll likely discover that some of your initial plan doesn't fit as well as you thought, and you can adjust as needed. But it's much easier to do this when you've built out only the bare minimum predefined structure.
How will this work in my case, with millions of files collected and nearly ready to sort? Stay tuned! We'll find out together over the next few weeks.
Until then, happy data-taming!