Making the Most of Quarantine Time: Organizing Your Digital Files

(Thanks to long-time StLGS member, Ann Fleming, for suggesting the topic for this week's post.)

After four months of trying to stay isolated, a good many of us are done with cleaning closets and drawers. Now that it is too hot in most places for working in the garden, how about getting some of your digital life organized? Is your computer a mess? Do you have files all over the place in no particular order? What about your auxiliary devices: external hard drives, your entire collection of flash/thumb drives? CDs or DVDs or boxes of old floppy disks? If you are nodding your head "YES!" to these questions, here are some suggestions for organizing your digital files.

Start with a bit of clean up:

• If you no longer have a working floppy disk drive or CD/DVD drive, then anything you still have on floppy disks, CDs, or DVDs is fairly useless. Be honest . . .  how long since you looked at anything stored that way?
• If you do have a floppy disk drive, then by all means, take a look at what is on the disks, and, if you still have the software to open the files and their contents are still meaningful, move the data to something more stable, like your computer's hard drive. Then throw those old floppies away!
• The contents of CDs or DVDs may still be viable, since they are likely newer, but, again, be sure you can still open those files and that whatever is on the disks is not your only copy.
• When you are done, hang on to anything you can still access but pitch the rest.
• How about flash/thumb drives or extra hard drives? If you are like many people, you have accumulated quite a few of them and have used them randomly over the years. How long since you have looked at the contents of all those drives that are probably just piled in your desk drawers? How much of what is on the drives is still relevant?
• Start by gathering up all the drives you can find in your house and examining the contents. Anything that is still important should be copied to your computer. Leave the originals on the flash drives, if you like, as back up files, but delete anything that is no longer needed or current.
• If you find any drives that aren't working, send them to the electronic recycling bin at any computer store; they cannot be repaired and will not magically start working again on their own!
• Bonus: Cleaning out those external drives will give you quite a bit of storage for new items.
• What does your computer's desktop look like? If it is covered in files with no rhyme or reason as to where they are situated, it's time for tackling the chaos.
• First, you want to put like files together in one spot, for instance, all the information on the Jones family, all the files for the Smith family, all the photos of your children and grandchildren sorted by family, etc.
• To do that, you need to create some folders/directories on your desktop. Regardless of whether you have a PC or a Mac, the process is the same. Use your mouse to right-click on the desktop (or control-click on a Mac without the ability to right-click) and, in the menu that opens, choose "New/Folder." (It's one step on a Mac, two steps on a PC.) 
• When the folder appears on the desktop, click into the text box and rename the folder something that will reflect its contents. Then click out of the folder.

 Once all of the files on your desktop have homes, it's time for the next step.

 

Now, you want to place folders inside other folders (or directories and sub-directories) and store them on your hard drive in your Documents folder. For instance, in the example on the left, there is a folder called "Kennedy/Kendall Family Records." Inside that folder, you can see that each family related to the Kennedys and the Kendalls has its own folder. In the example on the right, notice that all documents pertaining to the McIntire family are together. Some are loose but others are within additional folders.

• Take a look to see what is going on in your Documents folder. Just bunches of files with no organization? If so, start moving those files into designated folders. You can create as many as you need.
• The idea is that everything that belongs together is together so you can find things when you need them. Plus, it's easier to back up a single folder than hundreds of separate folders and files!
  

When you are done, your very last step is to back up your Documents folder so you know that your files are safe.

• Copy the folder onto an external hard drive or into cloud storage like Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive.
• If you have a PC, set it up to use Windows 10's File History backup program. On a Mac, set up Time Machine, and use either program regularly.
• Better yet, use an automatic cloud service, such as Acronis, BackBlaze or SOS for backups that occur in the background on an ongoing basis so you can breathe easy.