Nobody plans to end up
with 60,000 files.

The drive arrives on a Tuesday with a folder called Accounts FINAL and a folder called Accounts FINAL (older), and four generations of backups nested inside each other. Half the receipts are photos taken in a ute. Somewhere in here is where the money went.

Priya points Ontiqo at the copy that evening and leaves it running. Nine thousand files take about fifteen hours, so it is done by the next afternoon. Spreadsheets are read sheet by sheet, receipt photos and scanned invoices are read as text, and archives are catalogued without being disturbed. She works in Views the whole time, where the program says plainly that nothing can be committed. Her evidence stays exactly as it arrived.

Then she asks for every document involving one supplier, whatever folder it is in. Two invoices carry the same number.

The drive spins up sounding like a decade ago. Inside backup2 is a copy of an old laptop; inside that, old desktop; inside that, another backup. Marcus has meant to sort it for two house moves, and has given up inside a minute every time he opened it.

He points Ontiqo at it on Friday night and goes to bed. Thirty-eight thousand files take about two and a half days, and the program says so up front. By Monday it has read the essays, looked at the photos, listened to the demos and identified installers for long-dead software. It proposes six folders and three shelves instead of a nest.

Then the shelf at the bottom: eleven thousand files, nearly a third of the drive, are copies from three generations of backups. The proposal keeps one of each and shows where every spare copy sits. Seven files need his eyes, and that is the whole review.

Eleanor's filing system is Eleanor. Folders called teaching odds and NEW laptop 2011, a Desktop that scrolls, and a memory good enough to make up for it. When she retires, the memory leaves and the files stay.

Ontiqo reads for four days: sixty-one thousand files, four hundred of them lectures to be listened to end to end. The proposal follows how her work happened. Each course is gathered across its yearly copies, each paper sits with its drafts, the grant paperwork is in one place, and the lectures are transcribed, so she can search them by what she said.

She moves two folders, renames one, and commits in place over a weekend. Then she keeps using it: the collection regrouped by decade for her retirement lecture, and a search box that answers the way a colleague would.

The laptop still works, slowly. Every photo is IMG_ and four digits. Grace's first thought was a service where you upload everything and it sorts it. Her second was that her mother would have hated that. Ontiqo reads the files where they are, and they never leave the machine.

It takes the best part of two days for twenty-six thousand files. It describes every photo, reads the scanned certificates and typed recipes, and turns the voice memos (shopping lists, reminders, messages) into text the family can search.

She commits into a new folder on a fresh drive. It is built as copies, so the laptop stays exactly as her mother left it. She puts the undo record beside the archive, with its double-click undo, and uninstalls Ontiqo. If the archive ever needs unwinding, that undo does it with nothing installed.

In Dana's library, tidying is sabotage. Move one file and a session breaks; rename a folder and thirty projects lose their audio. So nothing gets tidied, and for seven years finding anything meant scrubbing through hours of audio on a hunch.

Ontiqo reads the collection without touching it, transcribing the speech as it goes. At 43,000 recordings that takes the better part of a week in the background, and Dana forgets about it. Afterwards the library regroups on demand, by year, show or length, while the disk stays as it was. And search changes the job:

In Views the program says plainly that nothing can be committed, which is the promise Dana needs.