How do you manage large personal archives that you rarely access?

I have accumulated years of photos, videos, documents and other files across multiple drives.

The problem is that cold storage is cheap, but browsing and searching old data is painful.

A full backup keeps everything, but you often don't know what is inside without connecting the original storage.

I'm curious how people manage large personal archives:

- Do you keep thumbnails/previews?

- Do you maintain metadata databases?

- Do you generate catalogs?

- Or do you simply trust folder structures?

What workflows have worked for you?