De clutter your electronic life.
We all have an electronic device of some sort that has data stored on it. How would you feel if you woke up one day and it was gone...........?
Now I have your attention, lets see if you have covered yourself should you every experience this.
Follow these few steps to review what electronic data you have, and how you are managing it.
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Analyse what devices you are using for what purpose - Mobile phone, tablet, notebook, desktop PC, server, gaming console, ipod, media box, external hard drive, cloud account – these are the most common ways to accumulate electronic data on a daily basis. Whether it is for business or personal use, we all save something everyday.
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Do you have any structure to the data you store on your devices – do you save things randomly or do you organise your data to make it easier to find something in the future? Do you have a rule about what data you will save and where to?
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Have you ever saved this data from any of your devices external to the device? - those who read my column know that I am always reminding people about how important it is to backup your data. Why? Because you can't always get it back if it disappears. Don't rely on the one copy you have saved on your device, copy it onto another form of data storage. These days there is NO excuse as there are so many options available. The internet has made it so much easier for us to keep backups in multiple places.
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Do you ever do a clean up to help minimise data clutter – as an example, check your email account. How many items do you have in your Inbox or Deleted Items? Have you created sub folders to make it easier to find that one important email? Another example is your phone, how many photos do you have stored on there, have you sorted it into date/event order or are they all just sitting altogether. We are so caught up in capturing everything these days we forget to actually cull the data we keep saving. I know personally I took heaps of holiday pictures 3 years ago and only ever looked at them once and have never bothered to remove the accidental pictures of the ground I took! Take the time to sort through the data you want to save long term, don't waste space or money in backing up things not required.
Taking the above into account, now think about where all your data is stored currently. Have you created a contingency plan should you every experience that dreadful day of not being able to access or see your data.
If you are working on an important document, don't only have one copy on your device – email it to yourself if you haven't got your external backup device. This way it is now sitting in your email account. Even better look at using Google Docs, this is an online document creator that you can invite others to view and edit; great if you are doing a group project or organising an event.
The key is to not only have one copy but don't get caught out by becoming a data hoarder.