Digital Housekeeping
As we are home guarantied due to COVID-19, we would have plenty of time in our hand to look at the topic of Digital Housekeeping. Housekeeping is a term which we are aware and we do it often at home but what does Digital Housekeeping means, lets explore!
What does Digital Housekeeping mean?
- As we are more and more moving towards cloud and saving data everywhere, we need to think about the data and remove the duplication of the same. Let me explain this in detail and give you few examples, a photo taken in your phone is saved in multiple places like local phone storage, google photos, iOS cloud, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
- Now one data is stored in multiple place and managing this or clearing it called Digital Housekeeping
How to do Digital Housekeeping?
- At this time of lockdown, you can start from WhatsApp, Google Photos, iOS Photos, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Gmail and other Cloud, Online File Storage platform to checkout the unwanted data and permanently delete it.
Digital Housekeeping on WhatsApp
- WhatsApp gallery where you get 100+ phones, videos everyday, so start with it and deleted the unnecessary video, this would free up your phone space and your WhatsApp backup file size will reduce in your Good Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. This will also help you reducing the data consumption while backup is happening.
Digital Housekeeping on Photos
- Google Photos (or) iOS Photos has the inbuilt duplicate functionality, use to reduce the photos. Go through the photos online and delete the unwanted photo which will reduce the space and get free space for new memories. Many times, there would be wrong click, accidental click, less clarity photos and incorrect focus select them to delete it. Photos which does not add values to your memories does not add anything to your timelines.
- Email is something we don’t even we focus but it occupies a major space of the overall capacity. There are lot of emails which come to our junk folder, spam mails, update, subscribed email and lot more. So, check out email folder and delete the unwanted emails. This may even help you to get your emails sorted and more organised.
- Use this opportunity to unsubscribe for the email which you really don't need anymore.
Digital Housekeeping on Cloud Storage platform (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc)
- Files normally get stored in multiple place and there are lot of duplicates stores in different platform, use this opportunity to checkout the files and delete the unwanted files to organise it more effectively. This will help you to archive old files and delete unwanted documents and gaining more space.
- Check out for videos which you have got long time back as attachment and delete them if its not needed, you may be able to achieve more space saving by this method.
Digital Housekeeping Tips
- 80 - 20 Rules applies perfectly to Digital Housekeeping wherein you should look for the largest file size and focus on clearing the same.
- Sort the file by the date so that you can decided if you need this really
- Important rule, if it does not solve a purpose or does not add any values it should not occupy a space in your storage.
Digital Housekeeping saving carbon footprint
- Overall, the data which is occupied by individual will be reduced by doing the Digital Housekeeping regularly and this also means wherever you save, there would be a place where it all would be saved locally which is in a datacentre. By following the digital housekeeping, you may help to reduce the power consumed in the datacentre which will reduce the carbon footprint.
Being Digital or Digital Way is what everyone is speaking about, however sustainability will be become a big challenge is we don’t take care of the data which is getting stored in the cloud environment. We don’t want to cut down trees or destroy anything just to keep unwanted data accessible all the time.
So use this opportunity to clean up of all your data and remove unwanted files and follow the Digital Housekeeping regularly.
Stay Safe, Stay Healthy and practice Digital Housekeeping
