I have a related concern on this topic -- having certain years' worth of very occasional snapshots, backups, etc. I need to clean this stuff up. More succinctly, what I'm saying is ... without a good, clean organized home directory structure, backups are unwieldly.

For one thing, I can't easily merge large folder trees, when they have different structures. I can do a manual merge, but that is quite tedious.

I can't really do network backups (over the WAN) ... over the LAN, yeah. But if you want to use an Internet-based backup scheme, then you need to only back up "the essentials" -- so, the folder structure needs to make that easy to mark, tag, or segregate.

The main idea I've had on this, thus far is -- keep the "media" files and libraries somehow separate/segregated from the documents, settings, and configuration information. "media" storage is inherently more bulky.

(Email storage is bulky too, but ... that's easier to organize and clean up, for some reason -- probably 'cause you can do it mostly via drag and drop in the mail client gui, and those moves/transfers don't take very long, plus the searches and sorting results can be used to clean up the message collections. Side issue on email -- my "Sent" mailboxes are always a mixed bag, I don't know how to keep those messages cleaned and segregated!)

I rambled, but am trying to say -- I need to find a good way to minimize and organize my personal files, making them easy to back up, and how to differentiate media storage (and backup) versus the smaller essentials (documents, settings/configs, records). Thanks for any advice; Larry C.