Spring E-Clean Up

     Spring is coming up...how do I know?  Well aside from the violent allergic reaction I have in Austin to the Cedar pollen and the calendar indicating that it is now February, I know Spring is coming up because of the huge amount of electronic 'clutter' I have piling up on all my devices.

     Every year come Spring I purge my e-docs.  Sometimes I am amazed at how much clutter I have saved twice or even three times!  I have at least 500 gigabytes worth of duplicate documents on my PC and backup drive.  Those are my files alone not including customers and past customers.  I actually keep all of those files separate so they don't count.  I also have a million pictures that my 5 year old daughter has taken over the past year.  It is so hard for me to delete even the blurry repeated half -faced selfies she takes cause it is so darn cute...but do I really need 35 of the same picture?  Back in the day we were limited to 25 pictures, unless you had more film.  How does one find time to sit and select a few pictures to keep when your phone/camera holds millions of pictures.  Right now I am transferring 2,305 pictures with the intention of erasing the blurry ones, the repeats, and the fat-angled ones.  But is that a waste of time?  Is is worth de-cluttering my PC?  Is it better to buy another external drive and save the pics?  What is the purpose of saving all the pictures, will anyone sit down and go through all the pictures we've collected in the past 5 years?

This is picture 1 of 15, almost exactly the
same except an centimeter different.

     I think common sense says to only keep the pictures that you actually want on the spot and delete the ones that you don't need on the spot.  Around here we have a set policy on how to name documents and files.  It is so easy to pull up the search function and type in a keyword and pull up the correct document.  Although I am tempted to de-clutter on a quarterly basis rather than a yearly basis.  It may take a few seconds more to save documents and files properly on the spot but in the long run it is very much worth it.

     As for your documents and other files, how do you stay in control?  Do you print and file paper documents or is everything electronically filed?  Do you have a system?

Thanks for letting me rant. In the time that I wrote this blog I have about 1200 pictures more to transfer. :/
2014 Resolution: Only keep the pictures I absolutely have to keep and delete the rest.

~Nancy Valdez
Austin's Virtual Assistant