I am not entirely convinced, for instance, that is true for photographs. I wonder if there will be devices available fifty/hundrd years from now with which to view them. I have no such fear that human eyesight will become obsolete.
Think about who will actually want to look at your photos in 50-100 years. I went through a little mental journey when trying to work out which photos to get scanned, at what resolution and how hard I should work to preserve as much of the original quality as possible. (I went the DIY route and bought a good photo scanner.)
Long story short, I realized that most of the photos I like, I am the only one that cares at all about them. A photo I took of the Grand Canyon or Mount McKinley or Isla Verde are pretty, but there are better photos readily available. Nobody cares about the ones I took except for me because they put me back there rather than just show me a flat photo. Photos of people, however, have interest to others.
So my plan is to focus on scanning non-redundant photos of people for sharing, and I can either take a nostalgic trip through my photo box every now and then or go through the trouble of scanning it all in if I get tired of having the photo box around.
Quick question: Does your "rule" applies to clothing as well?
You made me look. Yes, actually, I have apparently cleaned the closet out a couple of times. There are some specialty clothing items like a suit and a life jacket, and come to think of it the suits might be reviewable to see if they still fit and look ok. There are two long sleeve patterned shirts that I never wear, perhaps it's time to throw those out. I always think I'll wear them for work in cold weather, but I just don't like long sleeves and haven't worn them. I also have a few old patterned work shirts with missing buttons. Perhaps it's time to toss them since it hasn't mattered enough to get them fixed. Also just 3 ties.
For the most part I have gotten rid of too big / too small stuff, but a couple of months ago the Dillards outlet had a crazy sale and I bought a bunch of shirts, many for under $5 each, but most of them are just a tad too small for me right now. If they don't fit in a few months I expect I'll get tired of looking at them and toss them.
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I sorta kinda hoarded documents, specifically paycheck stubs, bank statements and investment account statements (but not credit card statements...those went into a 12-month rotating file). I bought
this document scanner largely to declutter work documents, but used it to great effect on my files. I went from 3 crates of files to one, and I figure I can reduce that by half with some more effort. The linked scanner is expensive at $400-$450 relative to most home scanners, but it takes all the hassle out of document scanning. I can stack letter-sized paper and receipts, and it handles them quite well. It scans both sides of the document in one pass, no flipping it over. The included software (full version of Acrobat, too, by the way) can do many things with the scans, but I put everything in searchable PDF. When I get a new piece of paper I want to image, I just open the top, press the button, and zip it's scanned, the paper goes in the trash. Now the challenge is to maintain a backup system, although copies on two hard drives in the same house is more robust than one paper copy in a file.