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
- Index the whole drive cheaply first — structure, counts, sizes, file types. No media opened; this is a map, not a review.
- 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.
- Curate with contact sheets: tile dozens of thumbnails into single images and review those, not one file at a time. Token- and attention-efficient.
- Reorganize with same-volume moves only (instant, no data copied), every move logged, an undo script generated alongside.
- 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.
- 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.