The rule
Index before you touch. Verify before you move. Quarantine instead of delete. A creative archive is irreplaceable inventory; every operation must be reversible until a human signs off.
When to run it
When drives have grown organically for years, when you need "something to show" for old work, or before any storage cleanup.
The play
1. Index the whole drive cheaply first — structure, counts, sizes, file types. No media opened; this is a map, not a review. 2. Separate finals from raws by evidence: version numbers and dates in filenames, rendered exports beside project files, "final" folders — then confirm by actually looking at frames. 3. Curate with contact sheets: tile dozens of thumbnails into single images and review those, not one file at a time. Token- and attention-efficient. 4. Reorganize with same-volume moves only (instant, no data copied), every move logged, an undo script generated alongside. 5. Dedup by content, not filename: exact size plus hashes of head, middle, and tail. Confirmed duplicates go to a quarantine folder with a restore script — reclaiming space becomes a one-command decision a human makes later. 6. Ship the best of it: compress web copies of hero pieces into the portfolio; originals never leave the archive.
Where it breaks
Trusting filenames ("final_v7" lies), moving project files away from their media (edit software links break), and deleting anything on the same day you found it. Also: external drives are slow — schedule the hashing, don't babysit it.