Clearing up that clutter

I am going to be bold and suggest that everyone reading this post will be able to relate to what I am writing.

Have you ever opened a drawer in the kitchen or the lounge and been confronted with numerous receipts, letters and guarantees that you should have filed months ago but not find the instruction book that you are looking for?

This clutter is a symptom of not filing the documents in the appropriate place at the right time and is the default behaviour for most people, or so it seems to me.

Nowadays, it’s easy to replicate this problem on your computer or your smartphone.  With the amount of emails and applications that are made online, it’s possible that the clutter and junk awaiting sorting on your desktop and within your Documents and Downloads folders will quickly achieve a worse state than your kitchen or lounge drawer.

I kept telling myself that I have to tidy the files and folders on my now effectively deceased old budget laptop.  I had photographs and files that were sometimes even triplicated in various locations.  I also had problems locating the file that I had been searching for amongst the unsorted junk across my laptop.

Filing systems are useful for finding what you need (incidentally, I grabbed this image from Negative Space)

With being forced to buy a new laptop, I have taken the opportunity to sort the mess that was my chaotic filing system.  I restored my backup into a folder named ‘!to restore’ on my new laptop and have since been filing its the contents into appropriately named folders and sub-folders on my new Hard Disc Drive, as well as being able to rid myself of triplicated files within my backup.

There were also some files that I definitely no longer need so I have deleted them completely, such as purchases from several years ago for small ticket items that I no longer possess.

One thing that I had been doing properly was backing up my files and so I was able to restore everything from my external Hard Disc Drive before grabbing any updated files from my SpiderOak One cloud backup account.

Please don’t get caught out without implementing a 3-2-1 backup strategy or the death of your device could leave you without a vital file or set of photos.  Use the DuckDuckGo search engine and search for 3-2-1 backup.  (Feel free to use your preferred search engine. I plug DuckDuckGo as they don’t collect any of your browsing information, search data or track your internet journey for advertising or any other purposes).