i'm in some ways, prone to the keep everything disease. while i do not care at all about physical stuff, and like to have my belongings fit nicely into a carry-on, i tend to hang on to digital creations and traces. it may be part of the rebuilding your existence meme. i am left today with the task of merging backups of 3 different machines i used to work on. fortunately, i adopted a fairly strict hierarchy for storage:

• work
• private
• misc
• study

with appropriate subdirectories. i have this hierarchy for imap, filesystem, bookmarks, my images, and plan to extend it to various log files in the future, like IM logs or browser histories. what would really help me is a diff tool that works across directories and lets me know where to put things. i know about the various synchronization features windows has, but they only work if you set them up beforehand from what i understand. ideally, at some point, my data will all sit somewhere in the cloud, and i can access it from any device without having to worry about synchronization.