Tag: low on disk space

Are you a data hoarder, like me?

| March 28, 2012 | 0 Comments

 

(pictures coming! they got lost in the website upgrade!)

That’s a picture of my hard drive on my laptop. Nice huh? I didn’t even think to look at the size of it until Windows alerted me that I was “very low on disk space” and earlier…my Dropbox told me that I was out of space there and I have a 50 gig account. Just because I run a technical business, doesn’t mean that I am technically perfect with my data. I do back up though, and that is important…but things are pretty sad when your assistant tells you that you are a hoarder. I can’t help it, I’m very creative, I’m a quick thinker and most importantly…I’m savvy enough to do a lot of things myself and FAST. If you’re like me, you may have the exact same issues. Our email boxes are clogged (because we are communications freaks and can never delete anything), our documents folders are insanely packed with little screen shots of everything we have made, images off the internet or just random thoughts of insanity (I have 100′s of text files from notepad lol). My beginnings have no ends! Well, they do have ends because I get stuff done, but now I need to really reign in these issues and take control for once. Stop the data hoarding. I will not hire a therapist!!!

It’s time for me to have a “data tune up” of sorts. Get some data off this computer and get things all squared up. …it’s time to let go. Free myself of years of data and stupid ideas that never went anywhere or worse yet, just OLD stuff that I MADE NEW to replace it. Why do I need that? The big question is, what do I need to keep and what can I pitch? I can’t pitch anything…I fear I will want to use it again or need it and there is no solid solution for me but to get yet even more data storage and figure out a way to search it fast and use it fast. Or…do the impossible and delete old data. <insert a tear here>

I started the data hoarding clean up with moving everything off of my laptop and into the Dropbox account. Then I went through the Dropbox data and moved anything past 3 months out of it and on to the computer at the office.  That computer is also getting backed up daily from Mozy.com

What to do after that? Now I have moved all the data, but have I done anything that will help my data hoarding issue? I have to “go through” (my aunt’s favorite words) the data that I don’t need to use in my daily life yet again and delete, delete, delete unfortunately. I seriously do not need all of this data anymore! I still can’t delete, it’s like giving up a part of my soul.

Everything is in order for data deletion. Now…I can’t pull the trigger. But my laptop is now free of all that unused Dropbox data and it can breathe happy again. I gave the computer a whole tune up as well and it’s running quite nice now! Watch for part 2 next week of how I deleted my data and what steps I went through to get it cleaned up. I plan on doing it over the weekend, and it will be a tough one for me!