Digital Hoarding
In this day of increased data storage, it is easy to forget what is where. Hard drive sizes are increasing each year to the home computer adding for the easy of saving files and program. Electronic musical devices advertise how many songs they can hold. Cell phones alert you when the cloud storage is full, conveniently this can be expanded for a few dollars a month. We spend so much time on a computer that we don’t realize that we have hundreds of saved favorites or tabs in a browser.
Old software programs have piled up. Our email inbox has thousands of emails half of which is spam. Photographs litter folders. Desktop icons or apps take up every space of the screen. Backups of backups of backups.
The list can go on and on across multiple platforms in a local environment and in the cloud.
A few years ago it was very common to remove data, apps, and programs for the next best thing. As digital media does not take up physical space it is easy to forget how much has accumulated over the years.
I am a digital hoarder.
I do all of the above and then some with digital items. I have multiple hard drives that backup my data while also subscribing to an offsite backup service at home. My old broken computers still have data on the hard drives and are stored in my garage after the data has been copied to new systems. I have installers that will not run on the current operating systems. My cell phone has 100 Mb of free space left due to apps and pictures. My list, also, goes on and on.
As it is the time of spring, I challenge you to review and purge anything digital that is no longer of value to you. Delete the dual antivirus on your home computer. Uninstall any cell phone apps you always scroll by to get to snap chat. Remove that internet explorer favorite link that goes to a shutdown webpage. Unsubscribe to the spam notification emails. Let’s end our digital hoarding together.
-Brent Mattingly
