Biggest personal file management pain points?

[exfat_fingers]

Ladies and gentlemen --

My name is exfat_fingers and I am a data hoarder and a home server enthusiast.

I've been professionally working on data storage for the last 15 years (all over the stack, from device drivers to cloud storage, including the ill-fated Windows Home Server among other things). A few months ago I decided to abandon the big tech world and all its office politics, perverse incentives, appalling privacy practices (and, sadly, good benefits and fat paychecks) and fully devote myself to a life-long hobby and passion of mine - namely, trying to make some sense of all the digital crap accumulated over the years. And, hopefully, help others to do the same and build a business out of it.

(Relevant xkcd.)

I have a list of things I'd like to do to solve the issues I am personally facing with my own environment (to start, having a unified view of all the files across all my devices, external drives and cloud stores) but I obviously would like to avoid building a product for myself and as such I am seeking the community's answers to the following question:

Thinking about management and storage of your personal files, what is the #1 thing that you wish somebody would do/fix/solve for you?

Cheers and thanks for your insight in advance.

exfat_fingers
130 TB raw disk space
1.5 million files

 

[T_Minus]

In my experience most people have segmented their files in general for personal and business use. For instance I don't need to see my family pictures in the same area I'm looking at my movies. I also don't need to see my business documents where I see my business code\project files. I don't need to see my business backup files when looking at business documents, etc... I go to where I need to see the resources. '

This not only reduces what I'm looking at but adds a layer of security by not centralizing all storage \ not centrally managing all storage.

My 02 of course

 

[tinfoil3d]

130 TB and 1.5 m files looks like a lot of movies and music there. Sort that out first, continue with photos and then the rest is just a couple of documents, which you probably don't even need anymore? That's how it usually goes.
In general you'd get into a time machine and just go back and put the stuff into the relevant directories once you get the stuff on your PC.

 

[Blinky 42]

In addition to "work" and "home" / "family" type groups I also have things broken up by broad categories like code, photos, movies, backups, etc.
Looking across everything without some of the top-level filters is almost never what I want to do, and running "locate foo" is too slow on most of my boxes anyway
Also the filename itself isn't usually enough to find things - I use deep hierarchies so the last few elements of the path are needed to find what I want.

I was curious so did a sample of ends of the spectrum on computers here:
In ~ on my main dev box are 7.6M files across 700G
Main windoze laptop 1.2M files over 1.8TB (wow - another 900k files in C:\Program* and C:\WIndows* - never checked before!)
On external USB storage drives: 1.8M files over 320T of drives

For all of the external drives, when one is full / moved offsite or offline, I grab all the dir listings and store that in a file per physical device so I can grep through those to find what drive has the info on it down the road. Sort of uber-manual tiered storage.