Are You A Digital Packrat?
Introduction
I was looking through one of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits, when I came across an article about being a digital packrat. I laughed when I read the title, but the next time I ran my backup I realized how big my backup file had grown and realized that I was in fact a digital clutterbug.
Looking at Computer Clutter
How can you tell if you have computer clutter? If you were to look at all the places you store documents, including email, how big would it be? With my photos and scrapbooking, my clutter footprint was almost 1 GB! I realized that photos needed to be purged, burned to CD and removed. Scrapbooking kits needed to be burned to CD, and tossed. Old documents could be deleted. Email attachments (which Eudora never deletes) were hanging around. It had to go.
Getting Rid of Computer Clutter
Backing Up
Before you get rid of anything, make sure you have a backup. There are excellent backup programs out there, and I suggest that if you do not make regular backups, you should find a program and start…now. I backup weekly to two external hard drives, burn the backup to CD, and archive the backups to an offsite CD once a month. It may seem excessive, but I have had to retrieve files from those archive CDs before.
Cleaning Up
There are two different actions you can take with files that are not currently in use: archive or delete. Archiving means keeping them on an external drive, or on CD; delete means to get rid of them permanently.
Deleting
Deleting should be used liberally. If you can get the information off the Internet again, get rid of the copy you keep locally. Go through the photos, delete the out-of-focus or incomprehensible ones (I recommend Google’s Picasa for this. It also allows you to store captions with the photos). If you have a hard copy of the information, get rid of the digital version (except for legal and tax documents!) Delete, delete, delete!
Archiving
Archiving should be used for those files which have importance and can’t be replaced, but aren’t needed right now. These would include financial information, and photos to keep. Mine also included genealogy files, all old programming, old websites and heirloom patterns that had been scanned in.
I would recommend making a folder for files to be archived and drag the stuff in there. Once you are done purging, you can burn the files off.
Summary
By the time I was done with the process, I had dropped my backup file size to about 150MB. This was much better for backup times, and also helped me get to the point where I can find things quickly again.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader or email.
![[Valid RSS]](/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.