One of the biggest efforts in making this kind of a transition is the digitization of your life. This is a huge project, and some of the work is still ongoing.

One of the biggest efforts in making this kind of a transition is the digitization of your life. This is a huge project, and some of the work is still ongoing. 1) Music and Movies. About the easiest as ripping CDs and DVDs is not that hard. 2) Photographs. There was a time when I shot on film, and so for all the images taken before then, they needed to be scanned. Scanning paper photos on a flatbed is not too bad, but scanning negatives is very slow and a very hands-on process. But it does produce the best results. 3) Books. This is the hardest. I stopped buying books about 5 years ago because ebooks weren't really ready to meet my needs then (I hate the kindle) and only started buying again now because the iPad does. But all these physical books. Scanning them is really a pain. Most of them just got tossed. We had huge collections of old instruction manuals that are long out of print and obsolete as well. Unfortunately, the books were an almost total loss. We flatbed scanned a few pages here and there and that's it. 4) Storage and backup. We've iterated several times in our strategy here. This is something to consider very carefully. The solution isn't the same between even the two of us, so you'll have to find your own. But keep at least 2 copies of everything in such a way as you always know what the prime copy is.