| When I found myself in your situation I went to manual backups and regular cleaning of my computers/backups. If it is important I back up immediately, if it is something I will not need regularly access too it gets taken off the computer. Mostly I started treating my digital life as I treat my physical life, I do not put an addition on my home or rent a storage space when ever I run out of space, I get rid of stuff. On my primary backup drive I have two extra folders, archive and holding; archive has all that stuff like taxes that I rarely if ever need to access. Holding is for all that stuff I am not sure if I really need anymore but can't quite bring myself to delete, anything that spends enough time in holding to get forgotten about just gets deleted. My secondary backup drive only holds things which are actually important and the loss of would cause more than a minor inconvenience or some sadness/regret over their loss. My computer has essentially the standard generic file structure of Documents, Downloads, Video, Music, Desktop, and Pictures with the addition of folders for current projects and a tmp folder and none get subdivided with nested directories (but the primary backup does). When Documents and Downloads start getting difficult to navigate I clean and backup including going through my backup drives. Desktop is for stuff I want to get to somewhat soon like a pdf I want to read, tmp is for stuff I do not need on my computer on a daily basis but may need to access semi regularly in the next month or so, it gets gone through and cleaned most any time I copy something into it. It took a little time to get used too and at the start I had to invest a fair amount of time but now it just means I spend a few minutes every day cleaning and backing up and once a week or so put in 15 to 30 minutes doing it. Not much different than any physical hobby or part of life, cleaning the kitchen after cooking or sweeping up the saw dust and putting away the tools after wood working. If you have a receipts directory all your receipts should go in it but I would question the need for a dedicated receipts directory, if a receipt is important it should probably fall under another category (like health or taxes/writeoffs) if they don't they probably are not something you need to keep long term and can go in a temporary folder that regularly gets cleaned out, I use my documents folder for those. Other family members should have their own directory for everything that is theirs, give them a quota and let them deal with it. |