Three Suggestions to Organize Your Hard Drive

Consider it spring cleaning for your hard drive. Here are three basics which you may (or may not) be doing to keep your hard drive organized and to save time. It seems that there is a real strong correlation between the cost of hard drives dropping and people having much more ’stuff’ to keep in electronic storage. Here are three suggestions to be organize:

• partition: If you have a file that you have not opened in a couple of years, do you really really need it? If you can’t bear to part with that important file, perhaps it can be parked in a separate partition. It does not have to be in your main partition. You are just a few more clicks away from that file, if it is moved to a separate partition to join all those other important files that are rarely opened.
• label precisely: You may think that you will remember what is in a file called “MyStuff”. However, so much data pass through your machine that, soon, MyStuff becomes the mystery file. There is no rule that says that you cannot label files precisely. The days of label limitations are gone. Be precise. Be descriptive. You will save time and angst. And you can rename those mystery files now so that you know what is there.
• delete: Do you really need that installation file from a couple of years ago? Do you really need that temporary spread sheet from 2005? Perhaps you can’t recall what file was for but it might someday be important again. If you can’t bear to delete the file, archive it on some other medium. Take it off your hard drive. Go through your files and see what you want to keep and what you can delete. Archiving may be that temporary bridge, until you are convinced that you can discard that electronic data.

These are just three suggestions. You may have some hints about how you organize your hard drives. Please let us know. - No matter what you do, though, back up the data. Your hard drive will fail. The amount of anguish and cursing will depend upon how organized you are and whether you backed up your data.

Catherine