Is it time for a digital clear out…?
| 3 min read
When you check the storage on your mobile device or computer, are you ever surprised by how much of it has already been used?
What is all this stuff actually doing there? How often do you access it? Do you really need it, or has your device become a digital museum of forgotten files?
Keeping everything in the cloud is no better. We like to think of ourselves as environmentally conscious, but storing endless photos — often in multiple copies — uses a surprising amount of energy, simply so we can look at them again, which, in all likelihood, we never do.
Remember that party where you took dozens of photos of the accounts department team making fools of themselves? You kept pressing the red button because you could. Of course, the cloud servers will be consuming power at a steady rate whether you store one image or 1,000, but the point remains.
And what about the mountains of email you have saved over the years? At that stage, you are not so much managing correspondence as practising digital hoarding. You keep it “because you can” or “because you never know”, which is usually code for “I can’t quite bring myself to delete it”.
I will admit to being guilty of the same habit. Recently, however, I looked at the storage on my laptop and was alarmed by how little space remained. I realised I ought to do something about it. As I have only had the laptop for 18 months, I am hardly going to replace it or install a new drive. Instead, I decided on a thorough clear-out — a digital spring clean.
The first area I tackled was photos. I found a large number of duplicates; yes, I too have a tendency to keep pressing the red button until I have created a collection of nearly identical images. Simply sorting through those saved me a very useful 4 GB. I then moved any pictures older than two years to an external drive, unless they were favourites. That saved me a further 6 GB. That's 10 GB just in photos, that I'll probably look at once or never again
Next came even easier documents. I kept those that were still current or particularly useful, and archived anything more than a year old.
Finally, I turned to email. Some people seem to keep messages going back ten years. Why? I archived anything older than two years.
In total, I freed up 20 and a bit GB of space. That is a significant amount, and I have not lost anything important. I bought a 500 GB fast drive and use ChronoSync for macOS (similar software is available for Windows and Linux), and everything is neatly backed up and out of the way; my devices can breathe again...