I used to keep everything. Then I said... "Retention Period Expired." and purged all of the old stuff I had no use for. Did I really need my notes from college 6 years later when the only time I looked at them was to digitize them? Digitizing information gets ugly. We quickly lose site of what we have and worse... where it is. Upon cleaning stuff up a year or so ago I spent the better part of several weekends just removing duplicate information caused by multiple machine rebuilds. Didn't want to lose anything so I made a copy. Looking back... I am not sure there is much I would miss if i lost everything short of my digital photos, tax documents, resumes, and a few other misc. items.

On the needing a database side... we have a good ability to search on tags and other meta data. The problem is actually tagging documents. There is not a great way to do this right now. I would love to have all of the tagging done on our digital photo library but that is a royal pain to do.