Personal storage growth results in immediate, necessary action

A few weeks back, I was doing the weekly download of photos, videos and miscellaneous documents that I managed to create on my smartphone and regular camera to my Sony Vaio laptop.  A weekly tradition that usually results in everything getting dumped into a new folder on the desktop with a promise to myself that I will sort through them later and drop them in the proper folders.  Well, “later” never seems to come.

So, a day I somehow seemed to have nothing going on, I starting plugging away at organizing my file system.  What a mess!  Thank goodness my operating system tags files with dates created, otherwise I would be lost!  About half way through my photo sorting, I noticed a problem. My photo files are getting out of hand.  I had thousands of photos in folders broken down by date or event.  Hundreds of photos containing thousands of pictures each.  I did some really quick sorting to determine just how much new digital content I was adding to my machine a week.  The stomach-wrenching total: about 4 GBs a week!  This is getting out of hand.

For someone who is fairly organized in life, my digital world feels like a big hot mess.  I do double back-ups of my data each week (including cloud back-up to Carbonite and a physical back-up to my Seagate external drive), so it is not that I am worried about that.  I am thinking just solely about file discovery and hard drive storage.  My Windows search feature works fine, and I sometimes use my Google Desktop search, so discovery I am good with for now – as a short-term solution.  But with each passing week, my concern grows about how much more space I have left on my laptop.

This new digital problem comes at a good time for me, since I am trying to find a systematic process for managing all of my digital content.  Knowing now that I am under a bit of a time crunch if I keep adding digital assets to my machine at the current rate, this has become a top priority for me over the next month or two.

Over the next few weeks, I would like to share my digital organization and storage progress with the audience of Refocusing Technology, in hopes others might be able to offer some suggestions or best practices for me to explore.  I have started working with a couple of tools, but am really still in the discovery phase.  I am always open to the idea generation that crowd-sourcing on the web offers!

Next week, I will explore the power of Google Docs, and whether that is a viable option for someone in my position to explore.  Until then, please leave any comments below for other options I should look into!