[xmlninja]

Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.

[marginalia_nu]

It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".

But don't do

  Stuff
  Junk

That's a rookie strategy, do

  Stuff /
  Stuff / Stuff
  Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...

When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.

[debugnik]

I've been telling myself I'll organise my now 4 layers nested stuff folders for 15 years.

A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?

[clickety_clack]

You should only organize things as you actually use them. The things you use are then generally organized and you haven’t wasted a bunch of time organizing stuff you never use.

If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.

Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.

[debugnik]

I largely agree, that's why I've still got all of it stored away, but I guess I'd like to keep track of what is it that I'm not using, what can I delete and what can I deduplicate.

[rkomorn]

Not the answer you're looking for, I know, but I used to have 100+ labels/folders, 4-5 deep, and decade+ old emails, obsessively organized etc.

5 years ago, I dropped down to 20 labels, and started routinely deleting anything over 5 years old except for a specific "keep forever" label.

No regrets. No instances of searching for old items and not finding them, etc.

[qwertox]

I moved my old pc into a vm. The vm is the new folder.

[saghm]

I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".

I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!

[qwertox]

I had to leave Windows 7 and start using Windows 11.

[_factor]

If only you could mount a separate home folder that stuck along while you changed roots. One can only dream..

[m463]

I once had a mac laptop and figured out how to get macos running under proxmox.

I was able to boot macos in a VM and migrate my laptop. It "ascended" into virtuality.

[m463]

You need to solve the migration strategy from stones and sticks to first desktop.