It’s spring cleaning time, once again. Well a little late for me with this post.
Yes, it’s that time to think about this. I know it can be hard, but the roller coaster type of weather we have been having lately here in Tucson. It can give you hope to go venture outside, but also rain on your parade still.
I am talking about spring cleaning. So you’re doing a lot of things for yourself. It’s time to think about the end of the first quarter. If you do want to follow this as your point of reference for marketing and financial information for your business. Not to mention that it’s tax time as well.
Hence, the reason why this post is a little late. You do have a few things to deal with first. So now the tech cleanup is the first thing. I will deal with the rest after taxes are done and what I get back. So this entails the tech part or digital part of spring cleaning.
Digital Spring Cleaning…
So the idea is fairly simple. You are cleaning up old files that are in digital format. This may include your phone, playlists, and related files.
The biggest thing to look for is that with anything financial, you want to keep at least 3 years as an extreme but 5 years is best when dealing with that. If having to keep for 5 years for taxes, or business contracts, etc. File compression and 2 places for the backup will ensure you a good chance to have the files if needed. You can update as needed per spring cleaning each year.
The most space-hogging files will be photo and video files. Some apps or software will also tend to soak up the resources and could be put to deep sleep or uninstalled altogether. One instance where Google apps store helps with this is when using apps on your phone. I love how it shows you which ones you have used and the least used ones slated for deep sleep. Keep this in mind if your service provider offers cloud storage, as well as security!
Any time when dealing with photos and all of their perks. As I mentioned above since you take all of your photos by phone. Using free storage or cloud storage or something similar is worth it. I tend to use Google Photos since it is easier to move files, and I can view them on my laptop and go through them a lot faster. This is how you create those dump files. Since a lot of photos can be either bad takes or whatever, just remember that you could also use them for social media as in the wild type of posts!
The other digital meat…
So you have a bunch of playlists that you have added or combined, a bunch of useless txt files, and the like. One of the biggest things to look for first is to pick a folder, sort it by file size and work your way down. Granted this may take a while at first. You will find that by doing a big once over you will go through it quickly. You are not doing a deep dive. You can always come back later and do a more thorough look over later on. Small steps.
With any type of Word files or text files, it is easy to go through them, but also they are the least to take up a lot of resources. It is the one that tends to be the biggest one that is all over the place. Visualize Post-it notes all over your house about different notes, saved links, copy and past history, etc. You get the idea. Something to think about since it tends to hog not only resources in storage but also with looking or doing searches since the volume of word and text files tends to be large. Most searches will also include log files as well unless you specify not to search those files. Which helps as well.
Final spring cleaning tips…
So you are cleaning out the digital files, and photos as well. This also includes your dump files as well! The neat thing is you get to relive some of the moments. Although it might be a bad one, you have learned and grown from that. So keep moving forward. At least when you have done a quick scan and cleaned up some files, you can start filling it back up again! LOL!
Seriously, nothing takes up the most storage than photos. Ask any Apple iPhone User and they will tell you that they tend to run out of photo storage. Even with cloud backup. Android is no better if you’re using any free cloud storage for photos from Google. Forget to pay the bill, or change services, then you lose that extra space. Why do some cleaning now and then it’s helpful to lessen your footprint and give your computer a break from constant usage for searches and file sharing.
Keep it simple each time and doing several times a year to keep on top of a large mess of clutter. Once you get through it, then you scale back some. You are trying to make it easy and simple enough to not really stress over. You also don’t want to also take several days doing something that will suck the life out of you after a few minutes!
Have fun keep moving forward!