This is what I have done. I found out that my digital camera takes photos that are as good as any scanned image.
What this did, it cleared up a lot of space on my shelves (which are not cleared just holding other stu.. ok, honesty here, more fabric!)

i have too many projects on my bucket list. therefore, i don't save any paper anything anymore. there are so many wonderful ideas on the internet, i'll always be able to find something i'd like to make

External hard drives are not too expensive. Keep your digital files there. Paper takes up space and deterioates(sp) too with time.

I tear out the patterns that I want to keep and then pass the magazine on to my sister. I keep the patterns in the plastic sleeves in 3-ring binders. This system has worked pretty well for me for many years.

I just keep the patterns and information that I want from my magazines and then take the rest to my quilt club. There are always ladies who are interested in the patterns that I don't care for.

Just bought a hanging file crate and now file them by catagory. It works great. I download alot of patterns online so this works better than notebooks and is cheaper and easier to use. No holes to punch and no plastic sleeves to buy. Had them in notebooks till I ran out of room in them. This works better for me.
Magazines I keep on a bookcase, just cant cut them up.

Agree here...a quilt design that totally did not interest me one day will later on be just what I am looking for. But I really do have too many mags. I too don't want to remove pages and then pass on the magazine.

I have a 3" three ring binder with plastic sleeves. I pull the pages out and store in the sleeves. I have co-workers that do like looking at the magazines even after I've pulled a pattern from one! When my binder gets full I go through it and see if I'm ready to get rid of some of the things I've saved. My taste changes, so I usually am ready to get rid of something. When I just want to look and think about a project I love to pull the binder out and just sit, read through it and enjoy a cup of tea.

I have magazines stored in binders, patterns in plastic sleeves in binders and I'm looking forward to scanning the whole mess to thumb drives - then storing the thumbdrives in some cute way so I can tell what is on each. I have started saving my embroidery projects to thumb drives. It's a big WIP.

For years I've scanned things I like from mags and stored them on my external hard drive because like someone else said there's usually only 1 or 2 things in a mag I may want to keep. It's true, if you burn them onto a cd or dvd the copies don't last forever but if you keep them on an external drive you can always have access to them. I like the idea of tearing them out but when I used to do that I still accumulated too much so I had to go digital.