Organizing My Computer Files

January is known as a month that a lot of people focus of getting organized. Personally, I love taking full advantage of the sales on organizational supplies, but I also love no cost organizing too. That being said there is one space you can organize without spending a dime. Do you know what it is? It’s the space on your computer. That's right your desktop and all your computer files.

I don’t know about you but since pretty much everything I do is digital, it’s been easy for my desktop and documents folder to get cluttered and out of hand. Then add to the mix the family and blog photos, the blog videos and the printables I create and you have the perfect storm for a cluttered mess.

I recently took the bull by the horns and uncluttered my desktop. It had gotten quite cluttered from all the files, photos and documents that I download and was actively working on while making my 2015 planner. Now, this is what it looks, as you can see it was 9:17 at night when I took this screenshot. So much more please to my eyes.

Next, it was time to organize the dread Documents Folder. On the left (the before) you can see there were a few files not placed in specific folders. So I deleted the files I no longer needed and created a couple of new folders (highlighted on the right) and organized the out-of-place files.

 

But the big issue was my Downloads folder... eeeek! There were 154 items in this folder and being a a mixture of photos, fonts, pdf files, and other random things. 

First I tackled the pdf and word documents, purged the unnecessary ones and relocated the rest. After that I renamed the all the photos and saved them in the correct folders.

Finally, I deleted all the files I was keeping for no good reason.

Ah... much better!

After organizing your computer, you may notice that some of your folders are quite large or you may find files that you don't want to lose. For our family its our photos, we have had the terrible misfortune of losing the majority of our digital photos because of a hard drive crash. I have also experienced a loss of blog photos because of a misplaced USB stick. When you lose precious memories like that, you quickly realize the importance of backing up your files.

As you can see below, I have currently 14 GB worth of photos in my Pictures folder, its definitely time to back up and reduce the amount of photos I'm storing on my hard drive.

Mr. UC, being in the Information Technology field, has handled all of our needs related to backing up our data. He has also made things super simple for me, placing an icon on my desktop entitled "IESHA BACKUP HERE." LOL. That man knows make it simple or I probably will not get around to doing it. Can't get any simpler than a click of a button. You may be wondering what happens when I click that button... well all the contents of my Documents folder gets copied to my folder on a 1 terabyte external hard drive.

The cloud is a great option for backing up as well. I use it in addition to the external hard drive for my edited blogging and instagram photos. You can use either as your sole backup option but I've found it helpful to have both options. It ensures that your more important items do not get lost.

Now, what about you? How do you currently organize your files? Do you have a schedule to purge unnecessary files? Do you have a way to back up your files? Why not try following this handy calendar provided to me by singlehop.com? Its an easy to follow step-by-step process, allowing you to not get overwhelmed as you get your computer space in tip-top shape. Also, if you are interested in learning more about the cloud and how to use it, check out SingleHop's page about dedicated private clouds.

Till next time...