I think the only ways out of this problem are to not hoard anything, or keep to a strict organization. I have a few things I have to hold onto - old photos for example, which I always keep organized by date, event, and with metadata - and a bunch that I don't need but I wanted to keep - which ended up just wherever. The unorganized stuff was always daunting to make any sense of. I would "back up" these collections any time I'd move drives or whatever, and it was a total mess.

I got tired of dealing with this, and decided that, if I wasn't going to put time into meticulous organization, then whatever I was hoarding was not worth hoarding. While I am still jumpy and grab whatever I think might vanish off the internet (I've seen it more than I thought I ever would!) or from my domain, it's helped me slow down, and it's helped me take stock of what I really have on hand.

When collections of things are in well-considered directories, with metadata, I can find things in them faster, I can know what I have at a glance, and I can decide pretty quickly if it's actually worth having.

I have a 16TB RAID array with 5.7TB used and one disk that is making some odd noises, and the prices of those drives has doubled since I bought them.

I'm feeling great!

I have a couple local NAS that I use for data storage. I organize things on there by personal projects, media files, games / software, and other documents.

Things that I download locally onto individual PCs, I don't worry about trying to organize. Both my download and temp folders tend to fill up with all sorts of junk on my local PCs.

Periodically I'll sort by file size. Anything large enough I want to keep, I move to the NAS. Anything else, I just delete.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-08-09, 20:43:

I have a 16TB RAID array with 5.7TB used and one disk that is making some odd noises, and the prices of those drives has doubled since I bought them.

I'm feeling great!

I worry about this too with my local NAS. I have 17 HDD drives installed in them and the cost of replacements has just skyrocketed in recent time.

I was doing OK until few years ago, then I guess my discipline dropped in that department. I do have sensible folder structure setup where stuff should go, but somewhere along the lines, my downloads folder was treated as temp folder along with the root of one of my disks. This will take a while...

Also, I'm a master of encryption. Putting things behind a password only to forget it. Genius!

My data stockpile has been continuously maintained, with some old files still chilling in the same directory for 30 years. The newest stuff tends to be the biggest in terms of disk space, so it needs to be pruned occasionally, while the older stuff can be left alone so I always know where it is. Any older system still sitting around with disk(s) is effectively a partial backup of my main system (and probably can't fit all the newer files, but I can manually copy over some of the important ones).

i used to struggle until i installed everything

No problems, I have a backed up backup.

I have 4x 4Tb disks mirrored to another 4x 4Tb disks and I keep an incremental copy every month off the premises thats also another 4x 4Tb disks.

I was the victim of a disk array failure some years ago, I still have scraps of what I had but basically everything before 2004 was lost.
Ever since then I kept backups of backups.