Picture this: saving, and deleting, your digital future

Sep. 14—One of my biggest ongoing projects this summer into fall has been my efforts to make certain my digital life — the photos, videos, writings, audio recordings, and everything else that lives as data — is safe and easy to access.

An interesting, even counterintuitive, part of this project is that I am throwing away (deleting) files and folders that are actual digital junk.

This project is a subset of cleaning, organizing, and decluttering my home.

They both follow the same basic theme, that I have more stuff than I need, that all that stuff has the effect of cluttering my life and make my life more difficult to navigate, and that any number of things could just go in the trash.

"But, Richard, I just bought a gazillion gigabytes of cloud storage. Why can't I just put all my files there?"

Yes, sure, that's possible, but have you ever tried to find a photo from June 18, 2017, on a cloud server like that? Or worse, have you ever had anyone say, "You took my picture when I was in high school. Can I get a copy?" Then they don't know what month or even year it was.

I have thrown away a few hundred compact discs (CDs) that were filled with my photos, but not before making certain that those files resided in several safe locations, like solid-state flash drives or cloud servers.

And yes, I know I have talked about saving and migrating your data (if you care about it), but this is different: this is about getting rid of junk, and throwing it away. I did that with hundreds of my wife's saved, moldy, spider-infested books and magazines, and I did it with thousands of saved, irrelevant, bloated computer files over the years.

The trick, of course, is to be confident that you are deleting the right files. When using a laptop or desktop computer, it's actually pretty straightforward: search for a file name (if you have an Apple Computer with a Macintosh operating system, it's Command-F, and if you are using a PC with a Microsoft operating system, it might be Control-F), and look at how many times that file appears. If I search for "Utah" for example, I'll probably see dozens of the same file, some saved in my archive, some resized for my website, and still more orphaned by various unfinished products.

The only critical photo file to save are the full-size, archived versions. Everything else can probably go into what the Macintosh Operating System calls "trash," and Microsoft calls the "recycle bin.

Pro tip: just moving a file to the trash doesn't delete it. It just makes it inaccessible and marks it as trash. To get rid of a file, you have to empty the trash.

I know I know: Richard, I don't want to end up accidentally throwing away the wrong photos. Solution: buy a really big solid-state external drive, plug it into your USB port, and drop all of those files into it. Take a big magic marker and write "deleted files" on it, then put it somewhere safe.

I'm not a big fan of buying software or hardware as a way to clean up my digital life. My wife constantly bought shelves and hangers and organizers and even a book about it, all to help her de-clutter, but that all just became part of the clutter.