Thinking about pruning the tree

I think it's time to prune my tree...

When I set it up I included my husband's family in it and now there are 1,761 people in it.

I wasn't concerned about the number of people all in one place, what I'm finding challenging is dealing with the number of hints.

With close to 3,000 hints there are many "irrelevant" hints - for example the "wife of 3rd great-nephew of husband of great-grandmother of husband" - for me to dig through in order to find the ones that matter most to me.

When there's a free weekend (meaning no cost, and also that I have the time!) to research I want to be able to more easily find the people I'm most interested in learning more about.

My plan is to split my husband's tree out from mine. According to Ancestry: "It's not currently not possible to split family trees on Ancestry, but there are two ways to get similar results: duplicating your tree, and saving people from one tree to another."

There are two options - both time consuming and involving a lot of potential loss or mess-up of records.

Duplicate your treeTo create a duplicate tree on Ancestry, download the tree you want to duplicate, then upload it again as a separate tree. After creating a duplicate tree, you can delete the people that you don't want to include in the new tree. 

When you download a tree from Ancestry, it comes in the form of a GEDCOM file. GEDCOM files are text-only, which means that any media attached to your original tree will not be included in the second tree. Media items will need to be added to the duplicate tree from the original. Facts, notes, and sources are usually retained by a file in GEDCOM format after conversion. 

If you plan to change both trees after creating the duplicate tree, we recommend keeping your original tree as a backup and downloading two copies. 

Save people to your treePeople can be copied either from public family trees posted by other members or from other trees on your own account. Copying people from other trees on your account can be useful when trying to move people between trees. 

You can save people from one tree to another on a person-by-person basis (meaning that only one person may be copied at a time).

Jan Murphy on Stack Exchange (January 2017) offers this suggestion:

Using Other ToolsIf you have desktop software, it may be easier to download copies of your GEDCOM, import it into your desktop software, and use a tree-splitting function there, such as Family Historian's Split Tree Helper. Then once you have the two trees split the way you like, you can upload both of them to Ancestry, and work on the two copies after that. 

Whether you use an online solution, or download a GEDCDOM, the safest way to go about this is to leave your original tree in place on Ancestry, and work on copies of the tree or GEDCOM. That way, if you make a mistake, you can start over again with another copy of your current tree.

See also: Splitting Your Large Family Tree, by David Fryxell, December 20, 2016

I guess I'll put this on my "to do" list because it sounds like it will take even more time than just ignoring the unimportant (to me) hints.