Time To Clean Those Drives!

Now that my most recent book project is completed and published, it's time to tackle something that's been building up for a while now.

Digital clutter.

I look around in my folders and there are files everywhere. I have bits of this and bits of that, various cover designs at various revision levels, snippets of chapters that were excised for brevity and clarity but worthy of keeping, you name it I have it. It's everywhere and it's a disorganized mess.

Part of this problem occurs because of the way I go about things. I do most of my work online and store everything in the cloud. As a result, my cloud drive is just as disorganized as my local drives. I say local drives because I work from multiple computers, my phone, and my tablet. This is why I do things in the cloud: I can work from anywhere on nearly anything.

So. I'm not complaining about the mess that I made by myself. I'm just pointing out that every so often we all need to do some housekeeping on our computers. It's just my turn.

Since buying bigger hard drives for archiving doesn't really address the problem (I now have two 1 TB drives and one 2 TB drive) but rather moves it around, I have to do the hard thing and look at the files. I'll probably make a grand backup of stuff first, then I'll start culling, both local and cloud.

The most important thing to me to keep are files containing the following:

- photos from my camera/phone
- completed books
- in-process books
- supporting material for books
- source code for software I've written for myself
- music files
- video files
- video project files
- image project files
- legal, tax, and financial files

This is no small task and I'll be taking bites out of this elephant over the Christmas holidays. If I ever post a screaming fit at myself, you know I accidentally deleted something important and it was permanent.

Pray for me :-)

-Kevin

Did you know I like to write: The Trillborne Wife, Policy, Some Reason, and Fractured Unity.