I sort of follow but can you be completely explicit here just to confirm for me that I'm not missing out on any low-hanging fruit? I basically have a cloud-located archive of all my personal documents, accessibly from anywhere. Is that the same thing?separate your operating system drive from this file drive, which allows you to do clean installs whenever you want and have everything file where you left it.
Not entirely. I'm assuming a Windows machine here, but what I am arguing for is a complete separation between the drive with your OS and all of your personal files; in my case, I have a C: drive with the OS and some small applications, and a D: drive with my file system as described above. The idea is that I can take my D: drive and plug it in someone else's computer and have all the files that I need ready to go. So my C: drive will never contain any file that I care about. This means I can do a clean install of my OS yearly, meaning that in an afternoon I can have a fast and clutter-free OS running. Note that I didn't mention archives. Never depend on your archives for daily or weekly use, because then it isn't an archive any more. On top of the above, I have two drives that I archive copies of my D: drive on, as well as two different cloud backup services.
Ok, so you're advocating two hard drives for any computer you use. I have a 250GB solid state drive on my main and only laptop (Macbook Pro) that houses both the OS and personal files, though 80%+ of my personal files are on the cloud. Archive is a misnomer, it's actually just a database/set of folders I use to organize my principal files. The other 20% of my personal files can't fit into the cloud storage solution I have without ponying up some money, though I'm not totally averse to ponying up for a decent cloud solution, which I'm sure are super cheap these days.