I try to maintain a structure for important stuff (documents, photos, decades of emails, etc.) that can be copied or backed up as needed. If I find a need to c

I try to maintain a structure for important stuff (documents, photos, decades of emails, etc.) that can be copied or backed up as needed. If I find a need to create an order out of chaos (e.g., for thousands of the electronic books I have) I find it best to sketch up a top-level directory view of how I want it; then switching to this method and occasionally cleaning up one-off additions is not hard. My 2c.