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 on a phone in a ute. Somewhere in here is the answer to one question: where did the money go?

Priya points Ontiqo at the copy on Monday evening and leaves it running. Nine thousand files at fifteen hours is a long lunch on Tuesday, not a coffee — the reading is the expensive part, and it only happens once. Spreadsheets are read sheet by sheet, the receipt photos and scanned invoices are read as text, and the archives are catalogued without being disturbed. She works in Views the whole engagement — the mode where the interface itself says, in words, that nothing here can be committed. Her evidence stays byte-for-byte as it arrived.

Then she asks for what a decade of folder names could never give her: every document involving one supplier, laid out in one place, whatever folder it fell into. Two invoices carry the same invoice number.

The drive spins up sounding like a decade ago. Inside backup2 is a whole copy of an old laptop; inside that, a folder called old desktop; inside that, another backup. Marcus has been meaning to sort it since two house moves back, and has opened it perhaps four times, retreating each time inside a minute.

He points Ontiqo at it on Friday night and goes to bed. It is still reading on Saturday, and on Sunday — thirty-eight thousand files is about two and a half days of honest work, and the program says so on the first screen. By Monday it has read the essays, looked at the photos, listened to the demos, and identified the installers for software that stopped existing years ago — and it proposes the drive as six tidy folders and three shelves instead of a nest.

Then the shelf at the bottom: eleven thousand of the files — nearly a third of the drive — are the same files, backed up into themselves over three generations. The proposal keeps one of each and shows him exactly where every spare copy sits. Seven files genuinely need his eyes; 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 that has always been good enough to compensate. Retirement means the memory leaves the building; the files stay.

Ontiqo reads for four days — sixty-one thousand files, four hundred of them lectures that have to be listened to end to end. A career is a big collection, and the program says so. The proposal that emerges is grouped the way her work actually happened: each course gathered across its yearly clones, each paper reunited with its scattered drafts, the grant paperwork in one place, and the recorded lectures transcribed — searchable by what she said in them, which nothing on her computer has ever been able to do.

She drags two folders somewhere better, renames one, and commits in place over a weekend. Then comes the part she keeps: the same collection, regrouped by decade for the 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 instinct was one of those services where you upload everything and it sorts it — and her second instinct, immediately, was that her mother would have hated that. Ontiqo reads the files where they are. Nothing leaves the machine.

It takes the best part of two days — twenty-six thousand files, and the photographs have to be looked at one at a time. It looks at every photo and says what it sees. It reads the scanned certificates and the typed-up recipes. It listens to the voice memos — shopping lists, reminders, messages recorded instead of typed — and turns the speech into text the family can search.

She commits into a new folder on a fresh drive — built as copies, so the laptop is left exactly as her mother left it — and copies the plain-language undo record in beside the archive: the full account of what was made from what, with its own double-click undo. Then she uninstalls Ontiqo. Nothing on the laptop was ever moved, and if the archive ever needs unwinding, that one file 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. Every tool on the machine points at exact paths. So nothing can ever be tidied — and for seven years, nothing could ever be found either, except by scrubbing through hours of audio on a memory and a hunch.

Ontiqo indexes the collection without touching it, transcribing the speech as it goes — and at 43,000 recordings that is the better part of a week, running quietly behind the day job. Dana starts it and forgets about it, because nothing is waiting on it and nothing is being moved. Afterwards the library regroups on demand — by year, by show, by length — while the disk underneath stays byte-for-byte still. And the search box does the thing that changes the job:

The interface never lets the arrangement be mistaken for a reorganisation: in Views it says, in words, that nothing here can be committed. Which is exactly the promise Dana needs it to keep.