Capture, Store, Forget

A tale of conquering the digital attic

Feb 20, 2026

It’s the final throes of winter here in Edinburgh, and the snowdrops are appearing. They seem to show up as if by magic when you thought all was lost. There are daffodils on the kitchen table, my wife’s favourite as she drives out the dark with a little colour. We’re both craving that switch of light, that period where we come out of winter.

A Saturday morning, with a few minutes to spare and a coffee planned later, I’ve got that niggle: where did I put those cookbook chapters I’d been writing? A long-term project of mine that redefines procrastination and hides in the shadows of slow productivity. I pull on that thought thread and realise it’s time to enter the digital attic. Pull down the virtual loft ladder, enter the dark, and do some kind of digital drive audit.

All I wanted to do was find the lost writing, those cookbook chapters I’d stopped writing when things got intense around here. Now I couldn’t even remember which folder they were in.

So, where to start? I began simply, just listing the drives and services one at a time. I’ve accumulated so much digital clutter over the years. Perhaps the curse of a guy with an IT career. With each new PC, I moved over photographs, files and recipes, creating backup folders here and a fresh start over there.

I pulled out the notebook and began to work through the places logically. It felt hard to get going and a little silly to write down the places where I stored the documents of my life. At the same time, a little cathartic. The job had been on my list for a while, and I was finally tackling one of those hidden organisation problems from above.

Once armed with the knowledge, there was a “then what?” moment. How do I dust over the attic? How do I clean it out? It can’t stay like that, just adding more chaos as the years go on, claiming that infinite space.

The desktop I run has two hard drives and a small SSD. There’s a NAS drive in the corner. An Amazon backup from years ago, when my storage service folded and Prime seemed to be the answer. Google Drive, I dabbled with as a way to work on Docs and Sheets. Then my smartphone, and of course, the much-needed iCloud swing space! Then, Microsoft OneDrive, which I use religiously to work between my desktop and laptop. Seven locations. I’d become comfortable with the overwhelm.

The audit showed me what I had. Now I needed to decide: where should things actually live?

My iPhone is my camera. Photos accumulate constantly. I’d been manually transferring them to avoid Apple’s lock-in, but it never kept up with the volume. It had never dawned on me that OneDrive might have a solution, just like Google does, to pull in the camera roll.

So I thought I’d try a tiny experiment and started there. I turned on camera roll sync in the OneDrive app and left it alone to do its thing. An hour or so, perhaps overnight, I had the photos on my PC in a year-date structure. I already had iCloud on the PC, so I’m no stranger to seeing them there in the drive structure, but somehow this felt slicker, and it kept the date timestamp. I liked it.

Once you enter the digital attic, you can get lost in there. Not quite like Narnia, though, like sorting real boxes, you can get lost in the nostalgia. The phone only had the last couple of years, so it was easy to avoid that temptation. I found a bunch of photos of recipes that interested me and then paused.

What am I doing here? Adding another bunch of recipes to all the other recipes I never touch, like some crazy collector. Falling into the trap of using another service, OneDrive in this case. The clean-up couldn’t just be about shifting boxes from one side of the attic to another. I needed a system that turned capturing into usage, not just better-organised hoarding.

Through this process, it also became apparent that I knew deep down why I stopped writing the book. I wanted to write about the here and now, that spark, that desire and the process for wanting to get better at cooking, a sort of coming out of the wintering period where I was facing into the change of appetite, which was also coinciding with the season of my life. The words of yesterday are somewhere in the note graveyard of old projects. And I know organising my drives is probably just another form of resistance. It still needs doing.

If I actually found them, I’d have to face them, organise them again. Whereas I want to do some work first on myself, in the here and now, not dusting off five-year-old work.

So finding them wasn’t the point anymore. The real problem, and I’ve been doing this for years, is the collecting. The things that I should turn into action, ideas, photos of recipes, tearing pages from magazines, storing them somewhere, and intending to do something with them. Never doing it. Another photo of a plate of food. Another recipe filed away.

Eventually, the boys will have to sort through this, if they get past the password, thousands of files, recipes I never cooked, and chapters I never finished. That can’t be the legacy. I want to change that.

Then I find the recipes I’d captured a few weeks ago! Part of trying to change my diet, keep up with the gym, and get more protein. Good intentions, and they’d already joined the pile of untouched files. Capture, store, forget. The pattern was still running.

Time to break it. I picked one recipe. Butter Chicken, high protein, 50 minutes start to finish. I’d make space for it this weekend. Actually cook it!