Digitial File Optimization
Physical clutter is easy to spot. Keeping it under control is a challenge, but it feels so good when you have a clean environment.
What about digital clutter?
In a way, we're really not prepared to cope with digital clutter. Let's be honest... it's pretty new to us! Digital files, whether you have one or 1 million of them...take up the same physical space (to a point). It's difficult to find the right systems to manage them--it's not as simple as buying the right shelf or box. Even worse, in a way they're MORE difficult to part with. It's just a few more kB... what if I need this file someday?
Even if it doesn't affect us as much emotionally, DIGITAL clutter DIRECTLY affects our PRODUCTIVITY. How many file trees do you have to click through to find a file? How well does your search work?
THE GREAT COMPUTER CLEANUP OF TWENTY ELEVEN
It might surprise you to learn this, but my computer at home is a complete disaster. My computer at WORK is alright, but when I get home I spend all the time at the computer CREATING, I don't want to waste time to admin. As a result, the system that I have in place is... organic to put it gently. I have one folder that's a GIANT backup of my computer as it was in 2007. ANOTHER giant backup from how it was in 2002. My files are mixed up, duplicated, all over the place, and overall just clumped together in ONE BIG MESS.
The Phase One project for 2011 is OPTIMIZE and I decided it was DEFINITELY time to give this home PC the care it deserves. As I said, I don't have much time to work on it, but I want the time I have on it to be as efficient as humanly possible.
RECTIFYING THIS HORRIBLE SITUATION
1. Build your new computer in its own new folder. You're building a completely new structure that is ideal, and you'll do it by gradually transferring files from your "old computer" to your "new" one.
2. Start at the very top of your folder tree.
Go through your folders one by one, clearing them out completely. If the top folder has a sub-folder, first click on the top sub-folder. And if that folder has a sub-folder....... keep digging until you hit the bottom.
Look at every single file. What is this? BE LIBERAL WITH THE DELETE BUTTON.
- Is it an older version of something? - delete.
- Is it something that you were working on temporarily... a task that you needed to do for someone else but will probably never get asked about again? The form you needed to fill out in 2006? - delete.
Ask yourself honestly... is this something you care about? Can you re-create or re-acquire it if you absolutely need to?
3. Build a new tree
When you're building your perfect system, the key question to ask is NOT what IS this, but HOW AM I GOING TO LOOK FOR THIS IN THE FUTURE? Try to put yourself in the situation where you might be looking for this down the road. What is the SIMPLEST way to structure it?
The fewer the folders the better.
- I only tend to create a folder if there are enough files to cause me to scroll.
- Modern operating systems have some very powerful sorting mechanisms... why do you need to create folders for different date ranges and types when you can just SORT the files that way if you need to?
4. When you've finished cleaning out the folder...
....transfer everything to its home in "new computer", and delete the old folder. Get started on the next folder in line.
CLEANUP TIPS...
- Rip out the Zips
Zips are harder to search. Unzip everything and delete the original zip folder. Yeah, you're sacrificing some hard-drive space, but digging through a mountain of cryptically-named zip folders to find a particular file is NOT fun.
KEEP your CREATIONS and PHOTOS
- If you're a creator of anything, take my advice... save EVERYTHING you've created, and save it in the highest resolution/fidelity/quality you can manage.
IT'S ALL IN THE NAME
Make the filenames as DESCRIPTIVE as you HUMANLY CAN. Use codes to divide similar files that are slightly different. (I like to use "_big" (high res) "_web", "_thumb", "_draft"...) Don't use acronyms and weird naming shortcuts that you might forget in five years.
DELETE "COLLECTIONS" - LEVERAGE THE CLOUD
I'm definitely guilty of this... I get infatuated with a certain comic series or concept and I start saving every image I can find of it. But then... I can't actually remember a time when I went BACK to look through those folders. All of my time was spent looking for new pictures to add to the folder. Unless you're saving the images for a specific purpose... it's clutter and it should begone.
If you can remember enough about a funny image, you can probably find it faster in a google image search than digging through your folders. The rule for funny video clips is "if I can find it in better resolution in 20 seconds online, don't keep the file." I was very sad to part with certain clips that I've had forever, but it's for the best.
LET THERE BE TAGS
Something that I am quite bad at is tagging. Modern operating systems have a lot of integrated tagging for photos and music. But if you don't keep up with it (or build it at all) it a powerful built-in tool that is useless to you.
With tags: more is better. Think, again, of how you might possibly try to FIND this piece of data in the future rather than describing what it is. Are you going to remember "Manning Park", or are you trying to just find pictures of "trees"? (that was a trick question... use both tags 
STAY MOTIVATED!
Getting through a big folder a nice feeling... until you realize how many more folders you have to go through...
Remember: "It will be so nice when it's done". Keep your focus on the folder at hand, not how many folders you have to go. Set a timer and keep at it for at least fifteen minutes every day. You'll be surprised at the progress you can make like that!
BACKUP
When your computer is clean, you should set in place a good backup system. (Can you believe I didn't have one until now? I'm terrible!)
Some good backup ideas:
- On a portable external hard drive (in case your hard drive explodes)
- On a portable external hard drive in another location (in case your building explodes)
- On a "cloud" system like Carbonite or Dropbox or SugarSync (in case your province explodes)
- ALL OF THE ABOVE
Set a reminder on your calendar to do your backup periodically.
KEEPING IT CLEAN
Of course, keeping your file structure clean after cleaning it is almost as big a challenge! One thing that I've found helps is a "THIS MONTH" folder.
I have a folder on my desktop. By default, every download, everything I save or create, goes into this folder. Why? Because when I'm focused on research or creating, I don't necessarily want to interrupt my train of thought to carefully consider where the file should go. I just want to GET IT, WORK WITH IT, and be DONE.
By keeping a central location for all of my "working" files, I can easily find everything that I'm working on recently. At the end of every month, I go through the "this month" folder and decide: keep (and where to keep it) or delete?
I'd love to hear your computer-organization tips, I've got a lot to learn still! 
March 18th, 2011 - 21:11
Ugh, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been meaning to do this for years; I even got a new computer a year ago and haven’t transferred my old files to it, but have managed to start a mess of new files on it. Wonderful, no?
The one thing I pride myself on is that my coursework is pretty well organized. My goal is to keep things organized as I create files, and to create new folders right when I need them, rather than leaving something on the desktop to languish.
Great tips, hopefully this gets me motivated to clean up my computer!
March 23rd, 2011 - 09:52
Thanks Ada!
Even having just one zone of organization is a good thing, especially if it’s the one you spend the most time working in!
March 19th, 2011 - 04:26
Nice post, I need to keep these in mind the next time I decide to go on a reorganize adventure.
As for me, I save my stuff in a Documents folder on my D:\, I don’t ever use the standard My Documents from Windows because:
a) it’s on the c:\ drive. I never store personal stuff on the c: in case I need to format that partition if something bad happened.
b) applications and games tend to abuse the My Documents/My Images/ … folders to store their stuff in, which clutters it (stuff automatically appearing in my personal stuff, no thanks).
c) I’ve had a general bad experience with using the default in the past and lost most of my stuff (this was before I became aware there was such a thing as a bootable linux or WinPE to recover data).
Inside my Documents folder, I break down stuff into
a) Documents (which are txt,docx, and other text/diagram files.
b) Images (these are the images or photos I made, edited, etc)
c) E-mail (my thunderbird uses this folder)
d) Programming (all my projects go in here, each in their respective subfolder)
d) Other (this is the least clean folder, which contains some subfolders for files from my cell phone, old websites I made, stuff I had before, etc). I should *probably* clean this out … or not.
Other than that I have some other folders like:
a) Downloads which is my default download directory
b) Episodes for series & movies (which due to disk space constraints is never that big)
c) Utilities (these contain all sort of nifty programs that don’t require to be installed and are still useful from time to time, I occasionally move stuff from Program Files directory to this one after a fresh install and I see the programs still work)
d) Music (all my music is stored here, OSTs in their subfolders, other than that 1 big giant list of mp3s/ogm/wma’s. I use Winamp as media library & player)
e) Temp (temporary folder (yeah right, with files from starting from 2004 and up), dump your garbage here, hey ho!)
I have a very bad habit of saving everything on my root d:\, then sorting through it later, and stuff that I don’t know where to file..eh.. ‘folder’ it under goes into Temp … and usually never comes out ..ever.
As for backups, I use 3 dropbox accounts to store my stuff under (all starting under 3 different windows accounts with the runas /user: command). I created NTFS junctions so I can still store my stuff where I want it (and not everything in 1 dropbox folder). I occasionally start them manually to let them sync. (I only have ~5-6gb of personal stuff, i.e stuff that I made myself and can’t redownload, so this is still feasible).
I should probably make a batch file that outputs the contents of each directory in a tree though. If I ever lost everything, at least I’ll still know what I actually lost.
Due to space constraints most episodes, iso’s and other space consuming I-don’t-need-this-all-the-time ends up on my external disk.
I think I also have acute panic attacks when selecting files and pressing the delete button when I’m cleaning up, I suspect I might have been a pack rat in a previous life.
March 23rd, 2011 - 09:55
Thanks for the great comment, Dwight! I’m envious of your 3-dropbox system, I definitely need to get something like that going
Default folders are the WORST, when I reformat I’m definitely going to look into changing those defaults. I’m not that computer savvy, unfortunately.
Don’t fear the delete button! The fewer files you have, the fewer you can “lose”, right?
March 19th, 2011 - 18:01
Most important rule: NEVER DELETE STUFF YOU’VE CREATED.
My new year’s resolution was to do the Great Digital Reorganization and my computer wasn’t even that bad to begin with. My rule of thumb is ’save it right the first time’ because then it’s ALWAYS where it’s supposed to be. It feels EXTREMELY good to know your digitally clean!
Also, don’t forget to defrag after you’ve deleted everything.
March 23rd, 2011 - 10:02
Defragging is good, I’m going one step farther – reformatting! >:D
August 7th, 2011 - 10:36
For those that are interested in getting external hard drives as a backup, there are actually 2 types of external hard drives, desktops and portables, the only main difference between the 2 is that portables have been designed to take the wear and tear of regular travel, while desktops are not. It wont be much fun after backing up everything, only to find that the hard drive has a bunch of corrupted files, due to the bumps and shocks of travels. If you are going to be taking it about, get a portable, if it’s going to be sat on your desk for the rest of time, get a desktop.
There are also Media Servers which are essentially desktop hard drives with a network connection, depending on the make, it is possible to have it set up so that you can access the server over the internet and download any of the files on it. Very handy if you get to work and find that you forgot a file.
For desktop and portable hard drives I would recommend getting something from Western Digital, the products they make are excellent and have a large storage size for their price. Plus some of their newer hard drives have some on board software called WD Smartware. This software will allow you to manage what files to backup, which it will do automatically whenever it detects a change in the folder. Plus it also has some maintenance and security features as well.
Media servers come in 2 flavours, you can buy them, or if you are tech savy and have a bit of spare cash/pc/mac lying around, then you can make them. For buying there are a large number of different models, cheaper models have fewer features, while the more expensive usually have more bang for your buck. Just remember to search around before you buy so that you can get the best price. One thing to remember is that while wireless might sound great, it tends to be both slower and more temperamental than a physical connection.
For those that are interested in making a media server, I do warn you that it is difficult, frustrating and possibly more expensive. You’re essentially creating a new pc for the sole purpose of having it connect to your main pc as a backup. There are advantages over buying one, you have a far greater control over it plus depending on the hardware, you have better options to upgrade as well.
And last but not least make sure you get more than 1 external hard drive; get as many as you possible can. There’s nothing worst than doing a bit of maintenance on your 1 external hard drive, deciding to put the backup back on tomorrow due to it being late, only to wake up and find your pc has decided to wipe itself. This has happened to me and in the last few months of university, so not fun at all.
Hopefully this will help everyone that is interested in getting some form of external hard drive.