Well folks, my laptop has officially conveyed its sincerest urge to dissipate into the beyond like a firework fading to dust in the dirt. After doing some investigating and getting considerable advice from my husband, I have concluded it's time to clean my computer.
Many of us forget to clean our computer out. We're too busy cleaning house, organizing bills and trying to locate important, but always elusive, pieces of paper that are imperative to our existence...(like proof your cat got his/her rabies vaccine so you can take them to the groomers!). Unfortunately, because we don't care for our laptops as we should, we get slower than slow web browsing abilities and on occasion, we get BSOD'd (Blue Screen of Death).
Don't even bother with your Word.docs, because those aren't the problem. (Though I do suggest labeling all your document folders by year. It's very helpful with archiving. For instance, my current writing projects are labeled.. 2011_Summer_Writing_Projects.) What's going to get you is your picture, movie and music files.
I, regrettably, have a horrendous to-do going on with my music files. I have duplicates, spares of duplicates and bonus extras of songs I mislabeled on mixes given to me by friends in my younger years when a gift of true love or friendship was symbolized with a mixed CD of your favorite crooning or dancin' tunes. I need to tackle it, but the truth of it is... it's time consuming and frustrating.
So, I started with something more manageable: home movies. These are random clips here and there that I've taken over the past five or six years on my digital camera. They take up considerable space on the hard drive and aren't necessary for me to store on my computer. I've transferred the files to one backup, an external hard drive, and I also plan to burn them all to data DVDs so I have two copies of these home movies. This should clear up a good bit of space.
I should note that to make my hunt for home movies easier, I had already undertaken the project of organizing all of my photographs and movie files by date. I started in 2005 and worked my way up to present day. It took forever, but it has made finding files and managing my files much more manageable. Now when I upload my pictures/movie files, I immediately label them as so: 08.03.11_Picnic_Erie_Pennsylvania. I do the specific date, followed by an event description. In some instances my pictures require me to create a text file to explain the images. This is namely the case when I do ancestry research and need to list specific locations or people for each photograph. I do a general label to all photographs, and then according to the number they are assigned, create a text file with a brief description of each image. I then save the text file in my picture folder and I go on my merry way.
With back logs of photographs it's harder to do a specific date or event. In those instances I try to guess the event and at least get a specific year.
Now back to my endeavors...My next step was to review all my photo folders as well. When you take digital images you tend to do overkill and click away, taking pointless pictures of fascinating looking leaves, muffins, straw hats and light fixtures that catch your fancy. Delete them. You do not need ten pictures of a pretty orange leaf. One will suffice. Go through and clean house, delete blurry images and ones with bad lighting or where your family and friends look less than fresh and would not appreciate images of them with triple chins, droopy eyes and leering lips circulating through the holiday photo albums. I suggest every time you upload photos from your camera you label everything, file it away under the appropriate folder and then review all the images and delete the less than stellar ones that do not need preserved.
Once you've got everything organized and trimmed down, back it up!! A flash drive works fine for smaller files, but for larger ones I'd say go with an external hard drive. The prices have come down generously over the years and you can get into one terabyte of storage space for under $100.
Before you go deleting anything off your computer, make sure you have two working backups of all your files. Don't trust one backup alone. I've made that mistake and lost hundreds of hours of work and a tiny part of my soul. I'm a tad paranoid, so for my truly irreplaceable documents I have at least four digital backups and one hardcopy (if applicable) at any given time.
I'm also keen on the notion that all important documents that can be digitized should be digitized and placed on a flash drive to put with your emergency preparedness kit. (The pack you have in case a natural disaster strikes. And no worries if you don't have one, I'll be doing a blog on this later in the summer once I've cataloged the contents of both of my emergency kits.)
My point is you can't treat your laptop like it's your tower. It sits on your lap. That's its big appeal. But there is give and take with such grand technological advancements: your storage sucks big time and you have to maintain your files to keep your computer running smoothly and efficiently.
Now go out there and tackle your comp cleaning too!
Happy digital trimming!
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