In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote a now-famous essay warning that the growth of scientific publishing had outpaced any human's ability to keep track of it — a complaint that reads as if it were written about email. His proposed solution, the memex, was never built as he imagined it, but the underlying diagnosis was correct and archivists had already been living with it for decades.
Appraisal: the art of not keeping everything
Archives don't keep every document an institution produces; they couldn't, and it wouldn't help if they did. Appraisal is the formal process of deciding what has enduring value and what can be destroyed, on a schedule, by policy, rather than by accident or panic. It is, in effect, a design discipline for forgetting responsibly — something almost no digital system does on purpose, which is why most inboxes and shared drives are appraisal-free zones that grow until search stops working.
Series description over item description
Faced with volume no human could catalogue item by item, archivists describe collections at the series level — "correspondence, 1970–1985, 40 boxes" — and let researchers drill down only when needed. This is functionally a lazy-loading strategy for human attention, invented for paper, decades before it had a name in software.
The answer to too much information was never more storage. It was a defensible policy for what gets thrown away.
Any team drowning in shared drives is one appraisal policy away from an archive, and one policy short of a landfill.