Spring has finally arrived and I’ve finally did my “digital spring cleaning”. It baffles me to discover duplicates of files in my laptop and more duplicates in my cloud storage. I have about six external hard drives and a drobo which I haven’t open yet but that would be for another spring cleaning. My main target is to delete unnecessary files in my laptop and have more free space.
This digital spring cleaning is specifically for my Macbook Pro, I have yet to do any cleaning/ sorting my email, social media and other gadgets I have (iPad and iPhone).
I deleted apps that I don’t use anymore
My laptop is only a year and a half old, I was shocked to see old apps I purchased just because they were popular back then. I am naive like that, I buy things I thought I’m going to use but never had. The best thing to do is to delete them.
I removed contacts whom I don’t have business or friends with anymore
I’m a certified introvert but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to meet new people. I like meeting new people actually and exchanging contacts is cool when you actually do contact one another.
I created a repository for my files
It’s important to separate personal and business files. These two keywords are my basis in creating folders.
I deleted duplicated files
This took me a while to decide as I wasn’t sure which is which. I’ve just said to myself that these files won’t kill me if I happen to delete any of them. Ooops!
I organised my photos according to year-month-event they were taken.
Half of my files are photos, I rearranged each folder and rename it by year-month-event. It’s best to have proper naming of them where I can recall events just by looking at the title. After doing so, I moved all the pictures in my cloud storage.
I weed out my Safari bookmark
I’m used to bookmarking everything I see on the internet and this has to stop! I hardly revisit these sites anyway. Digital trends keep changing and several UI design tips I bookmarked a year ago was not relevant today anymore. I deleted ‘online shopping’ folder as well, it’ll be better for my soul ^-^
I bin files under ‘Downloads’
This should be done every week or every time I remember. It cannot be ignored, ‘Downloads’ folder is a trap.
Design Spice & Co 
How did you save your digital photos? This is something I’m totally trying to figure out! Right now, I have photos on two different flash (thumb) drives but I’ve been moving a few over to Google Drive (slowly so that I don’t take up all the space) but I know that you get unlimited photo storage on Google Photos but I don’t like that you can’t easily create folders for them. But I want to make sure I have backups and don’t lose them (which is why they are currently on two drives that are not kept in the same area…
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I purchased OneDrive which gives me 1TB storage. That’s where I put all my photos – in the cloud. It’s a yearly subscription though but I find it handy and worth my money. It does comes with online MS Office 365, I use Macbook so that’s quite handy to have. I like that it has mobile app where you can access and download my files anywhere.
One thing I’m also considering to buy this year is WD My Cloud, it’s an external hard drive. Look it up, you might prefer that instead.
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