How on earth do you survive with just one big box of cables? I've got mine sorted into plastic storage boxes with labels, so things like 'Firewire' or 'Monitor' or 'SCSI' can get me to a particular box to sort through. I recently needed a SCSI-2 terminator to connect a CD-ROM drive to a 1990s sampler, and my box came up trumps. It's so pleasing when you find stuff like that...

I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.

We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.

I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately.

Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc.

Grouping them is key to deduplicating.

It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them.

I also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them.

You’re not serious about it if you only have one box

I had four big plastic totes full of cables. I pared them down to just one recently. I'm 90% happy with the move. It's ok to let go sometimes.

Every now and then I look through the cables and take out the ones I no longer have hardware for. We have a cargo-tram every couple of months where you can bring things for disposal that don't go to normal garbage or recycling. Supposedly they recycle the cables but I suspect that means incinerating them (to generate electricity) and collecting the metal after.

My cable box is my retirement fund. Copper prices are rising, and scrap-metal dealers pay pretty well for it. But jokes aside: last year I also sorted some out and took 10 kilos of household cables to the local scrap-metal dealer here in Germany and got €30 for them. Better than throwing them away.

do yourself a favour and buy some zip mesh bag on amazon (often used for children's toy sorting; they're much more robust than zip-locks) and use them to group your cables. the big box(es) goes from a source of stress to an absolute delight.

In my big box of cables I have, among other things, a double-ended USB-A cable. I understand that this is absolutely not standards compliant, and I have absolutely no idea of where I got it from. I have never used it. But it is a thing that exists.

Getting rid of almost 10 different proprietary charging cables for pre-smart phones and some old laptops felt great though :P

I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.

I have a transparent plastic box of my own, with cables twist-tied and sorted into labeled zip bags.

The box stays, but cables come and go. I cleared out some PS/2 related cables recently, after not owning any hardware with that port for like a decade now.

I do have a big box 'o cables, though organization is getting difficult. I need some way to organize them into broad categories (USB, audio, power, ethernet, etc).

Wife forced me to consolidate my boxes of cables to a single bin. I joke the retail price of the bin is hundreds of dollars

Rubbermaid Roughneck half size of resealable bags of cables.

I still have quite a number of packing cubes with silicone-tie'ed and zip tie'ed cables.

I do want to mention though, a huge amount of cables can be replaced by usb-c cables + an adapter. You don't need a bus to HDMI cable: just get an adapter that has usb-c female, that your cable plugs into, that changes it to HDMI. Ditto for displayport, USB micro, USB b, USB a.

And for power VFLEX has a quite reasonably priced adapter to DC barrel jacks. I still have I dunno 70 power supplies, for laptops, gadgets and whatever. But at this point almost all my devices actually run on high efficiency gan usb-c power supplies. These once again follow the pattern: a usb-c female, then a pigtail (yay, better than fixed, like the HDMI), then the barrel jack.