I'm for just tossing it in the archive and leaving it there permanently. There are some tags I use, but they're all general (work, school, etc) just so I can see things in a kind of context. I use search to find almost anything, and if I can't find it there, I go through the list by date and that usually takes care of it after a screen or three. The thing is, I used to keep emails in all kinds of folders and now I don't. It hasn't made much difference either way in retrieval, but it's made a big difference in filing time.

I haven't made this leap with my file system yet, but I'm getting close to that point. Since digital space is so cheap and getting cheaper, why bother to archive off things separately? I do a backup of my whole hard drive and that's it. For things like movies, which are huge, they go on an external drive, but that's pretty much it.