[glhaynes]

Well said. One important part of that for me is to resist any attempt to impose a structure on those "piles" of digital docs. For the things you mention, I'm exclusively going to access them in the future — if I ever do — via search (or perhaps in some late-night nostalgic browsing) so I don't need to organize the paper I wrote in college into a complicated folder hierarchy of College > Biology > 2nd semester. Just throw it on the pile. Embrace its pileness. If archiving a doc in this way takes any thought whatsoever, I'm going to be much less likely to do the archiving in the first place and it's going to end up causing clutter in some place where it does negatively affect me.