Wasn’t planned, but I ended up spending hours and hours cleaning out my digital life this weekend, which is more or less and never ending task unless you just delete everything. I’ve done this a few times over the years and even over the past few weeks and I think the most important thing is getting a system that maintains itself over time and just letting go of files you haven’t used and don’t plan to use (e.g. that 10GB digital discography of xxx that seemed like a good idea to download at the time). Turns out, if I haven’t read the 10GB history of the planet by now, I likely won’t any time soon. delete.
The hardest part is cleaning up my research files and philosophy/art work that *might* be important at some point in time but are completely disorganized and duplicated over many poor attempts of making backups of backups just to be extra safe.
I now us backblaze to backup everything, but in order to only take a few months instead of half a year to do so. Using a combination of windirstat and ccleaner has allowed me to remove big files and duplicate files that are the biggest offenders, such as 20GB of linux isos and virtual machines hiding in my second semester of CMU research.
It’s nice finding pictures and memories I’d forgotten in the past and watching long forgotten movies with my wife now. My biggest things moving forward now are to (1) not make back ups of back ups, (2) not add random crap to my backups, and (3) delete not so useful things much more often.
Keeping a clean digital life and maintaining it essential, and keeps a nice peace of mind in moving forward.