I'm one of those who advocates for NOT having everything online all the time. Since my high school days, I've filed everything in chronological order. It's relatively easy for me to find negatives I made in 1969. (My event memory is pretty good, and besides, I have my yearbooks to back it up.)
Since working in Lightroom, I've started a new catalog every time I've started a new drive. The new catalog is on that drive. The drives are stored by date, say, 2014 to 2016 for one of them. When I need an image from 2015, I plug in that drive and point Lightroom to that catalog. Boom!
On that drive, my images are separated by year, and event within the year. Each event includes the date and a few descriptive words. In the Library, it is very easy to find the event I need, pop up the images on the grid or "light table" motif, click on the image, and do what I want with it in Develop or Print (or just export it).
I worked in a large portrait lab for decades. When we transitioned to digital production in the early 2000s, we had a similar setup. We had 72 TB online, and a database application to manage it. We could find and load any job (event) in seconds, by following a simple path similar to this one:
Territory Number --> Customer Number --> Job Number --> Session Number
Job numbers were structured so that we knew the year by looking at them. The database stored the file location for each job on the server. A separate database identified each subject in a job's subject database, which led to all the associated order data, and the associated image(s) for each subject. Between our retail territories and our wholesale customer territories, we photographed millions of people each year, so we had to be able to keep them straight!
If the market changes to the point where my old drives can't be read by current ports, I'll just disassemble the cases, pull out the bare drives, and use a universal drive adapter to copy data to a new drive standard.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3NV2SPATA/ They've built adapters like these for many years now, and I've no doubt they'll update it for USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 or whatever they need to.
I'm one of those who advocates for NOT having ever... (