My life with computers is truly beginning to hit the 15 year mark—Monica and I got our first PC the year we were married and before that I used a non-DOS, non-Windows word processor most of the time. So, my computer life is truly linked to our first year of marriage (which is interesting in itself). Needless to say, the files have built up.
Think of it this way. If you never threw anything away—or maybe just threw away junk mail for fifteen years, what would your basement look like?
Even though I have tried to keep it somewhat organized, I have piles and piles of material that simply needs to be dumped. In total, I have 230GB of material stored on my hard drive. This is without movies—some music on iTunes; but mainly documents. In some cases, I have multiple copies of copies of stuff—because the junk that I have been storing needs to be backed up and then gets put back on my main hard drive somehow, I also have a hard drive with stuff on it where I’ve backed up stuff. Thankfully, Carbonite backs my computer up automatically so I feel secure that it is all there—whatever it is!
So, I am starting a new project. One that I need to focus on. I am going to clean out my file management basement.
Recently, I began a subscription to Office 365; which includes one Terabyte of storage. This storage, through “One Drive”, can sync from any computer and be able to give me access from which ever computer I am working on (except from the Army computers). This will give me a nice clean place to build a new storage facility. It is also backed up by Carbonite as if where another folder on my computer—which is a good failsafe if Microsoft gets hacked.
I have tested a file system transfer of some of my sermons, moving the files into a new “Sermon” folder and deleting the duplicates into the “one drive”. And will be shortly building “Boxes” of files to separate by category to be sorted through file by file. This is a long tedious process, but I must start somewhere. One thing that, I don’t find—is an easier way to do this.
I have learned much about computers in the last 15 years, one of the things we are not learning is that hoarding doesn’t work in cyberspace any more than it does in the basement.