Looking at Leftovers

In Cruft from Blue Skunk Blog, Doug Johnson  shares,

“Cruft is jargon for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for superseded and unused technical and electronic hardware and useless, superfluous or dysfunctional elements in computer software. Wikipedia”

Then he asks,

“As educators move files from local drives to cloud-based application, are they moving a lot of cruft as well? And does all that gunk make finding and using the good stuff more difficult. Any suggestions for identifying and managing the cruft in your virtual life?”

I am really bad about collecting things in real life and in my virtual life. It is hard for me to let go of things because I’m afraid that I might need it again some day. Slowly I’m running out of space in my home for all the things I want to keep. This past year I decided that if something has sentimental value but no monetary value, I am going to take a few pictures and then let it go.  So far, I am doing pretty well with that but sometimes I need more time.

Then I realize that I take a lot of pictures and those take a lot of room on hard drives. I have 2 external hard drives full of pictures already. But sometimes I like going back and looking at some. Some of them even document some events that I had forgotten.

Some of the stuff on my hard drive are duplicates of other files. I have run back ups of data and then I’m afraid that I might lose some files so I keep duplicates of the files. Then I realize that if this hard drive dies, I will lose all of the files including the duplicates so I’ve started to weed through the duplicates.

I am also creating more folders so that I will be able to find files easier. Sometimes I get lazy and just dump files in a basic “general” folder with intentions of going back and reorganizing them into other folders. Of course, time goes by and it doesn’t get done. I’m going to plan a file check once a week and spend 1 hour of going through files and getting rid of ones that are no longer important. I plan on setting a timer because I tend to get too involved and I can end up spending too much time doing this. It may take a longer overall time but this way I won’t get overwhelmed.

How do you handle your cruft? Please share.