You two have touched on a tender spot re the content in my file cabinets - all of the work I did in graduate school that I thought I might modify and publish later. So far it hasn't happened. There is one article I'd like to write but it requires mostly new research, so if I kept the main related paper and shredded the all of the rest I'd be up on drawer space.

That said, my second desk in the office is two two-drawer file cabinets sitting about 18" apart topped with a lovely clear piece of birch plywood (I ironed on oak veneer around the edge to give it a polished look). That's where a lot of the scholarship lives. So even if I empty the contents, I would use the space to store something else because I don't want to lose that desk. The file with more business stuff is also two-drawer and it sits on a welded wheeled base a friend made and wasn't using so gave to me. I can move the cabinet away from the corner it faces when I need to get into it. And the everyday file is the equivalent of a 1-drawer file, it's a heavy plastic bin with lids that fold down to the side. Hanging files are inside and if I had to grab one box to take out of the house for current records, that would be it. (That's why I set it up this way.)

This requires the letting go of the work I enjoyed and was passionate about but that I'm not going to use again and acknowledging that no university is going to want "my papers" at some point. I have the published copies of things, the rest can go into the burn barrel.