If you’ve been trying to build the perfect storage system, you’d have probably realized by now that no such thing exists. That said, you can certainly get close with a whole lot of trial and error. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got a tower of internal and external hard disks collecting dust, maybe a few cloud-connected drives, and definitely a few NAS drives waiting to be perfectly organized some day.

At one point, I was juggling all of these at once. Between local hard drives for projects, NAS drives for media, an external drive for backups, and mandatory cloud syncs for redundancy—it’s a lot. It might look like I was well organized on paper, but in reality, it was utter chaos. My storage wasn’t helping me be organized, it was all over the place, and I was pretty sure i was missing some files on one drive or the other. So, I did what I’d been avoiding all this long. I started deleting, merging, deduping and rethinking how i wanted all of this to work. As it turns out, the simpler I made it, the better it worked.

Starting from zero

The illusion of organization

The thing about storage setups is the fact that it tend to expand much faster than you think. Your first impulse is to think about segregation. One drive for photos, another drive for music, maybe one more for movies, and, of course, one for backups. Along the way, you might get a NAS too. That’s exactly where I was as well.

I had files on hard drives, and when a drive would run full, I would have files on the wrong hard drive. Between duplicate folders on my NAS, the same backups across multiple drives and similarly duplicated cloud backups because I’d forgotten all about where my last backup was, it was complete and utter chaos. Well, the first step towards fixing that was admitting that I had too many hard drives and that my data was just too scattered. I was adding new things without consolidating or clearing out the old. Moreover, adding a new hard drive to the mix was only making it worse.

So, I started from zero. One NAS, a full array of drives, and one external drive at a time. From there, the clean-up process began. Following a single source of truth method allowed me to make more progress in cleaning up storage than anything else ever had. Yes, even more than deduplication software that is less than perfect. Can it feel risky, yes. But backing that up is a problem that we’ll sort out soon.

Cleaning up the chaos

Flattening folders, consolidating drives and rethinking backups

I started off by cleaning up my folder structures. Backing up files to hard drives just because I needed to offload some storage from my laptop meant I had a deep nested structure of folders that made no sense to me years down the line. I flattened everything down to simple categories. Photos, work, documents and media. Each of these had subfolders, yes. But with simple year or task-based nomenclature.

Predictably, the next step was to start going through all my files, one drive at a time, copying them into the right place. I followed this up by labeling each drive that I’d already revisited. While I was sure I didn’t want to format any drive before the entire backup had been completed, I also didn’t want to revisit existing drives.

Once done, the next big step was to rethink backups. I’d been running multiple tools across drives and cloud services. But this wasn’t ideal. Now, I have a much simpler set up — an external drive that syncs from the NAS once a week, and a cloud sync for critical folders. Simple and reliable. If you want to go a step further, you could add another NAS too, synced from your source NAS and preferably kept at an alternate location.

Consolidating my storage had immediate tangible benefits. For one, I knew exactly where each file was. Moreover, there were speed benefits. Not just in terms of file transfers, but more in getting what I needed. With fewer layers, fewer folders to sort through, it was understandably much quicker to get to what I needed. Convenience is the other big advantage. I just have to copy over new files to one spot, and my daily and weekly backups happen on their own. Both to an external drive and to the cloud. I no longer have to worry about external drives being appropriately backed up.

Simplifying everything has its payoff

I’ll be honest. Sorting through fifteen years of drives, NAS drives, folders called backups, and actual backups took much longer than I anticipated. However, chasing the perfect storage system has its advantages. I’ve reduced clutter, both visually because of the sheer number of drives in my drawer, as well as the clutter of managing workflows. Moreover, I’ve gained speed, efficiency and reliability through effective backups. As it turns out, simplicity was the key all along.