Life in today’s world demands more and more Megs and Gigs of your computer’s hard drive. In a day where most people are compacting living space and maybe even the size of their car, activities for both work and play require more space virtually.
Over the course of the holiday season, your camera will make more clicks than a pool hall. In the spirit of holiday fun, the number of photos you take may be overkill in an attempt to preserve every moment.
For many years, digital photos have been the way to go when it comes to saving your precious memories, even though nostalgia buffs may still opt for photos developed in a darkroom that you can hold in your hands and file away in a physical album.
Social media has increased the number of photos we take, too! It has become an everyday part of life to share moments of our lives and numerous selfies on social media sites. Not to mention the photos we scan onto the computer to save our pre-digital memories!
Business owners who advertise on social media sites may also be busy uploading photos from events this year and years past.
Videos of baby’s first Christmas, a priceless moment between friends, that funny thing the dog does, the hilarious way the cat reacts to a cucumber or the holiday play at the kids’ school all need virtual space to exist.
Music is declared by some to be the soundtrack of our lives. It has a special place in our hearts and deserves a special place on our hard drives, too!
It all adds up before you realize it.
With all your “soft” files occupying your hard drive, do you have room for productivity software?
Clearing clutter from our physical space can still be a challenge just as it was 20 years ago, but now more people struggle with virtual clutter and limited space. Here are a few ways you can avoid being a Meg miser this holiday season and enjoy keeping all your files:
1. Cloud storage
This is the way to go when it comes to keeping your hard drive space available and saving your cherished files. A number of cloud services are available for you to choose from. Some of them are free, so take a look at what you need before you commit to a paid service. Your files will be stored in a secure server warehouse and you can access them any time from any place with an internet connection when you log into your account. Here is PC Mag’s assessment of the best cloud storages of 2015: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413556,00.asp
2. External hard drive
Maybe you are a skeptic and aren’t ready to leap into the cloud with your virtual keepsakes. If you are not ready to part with having a physical object that stores your files, external hard drives with a terabyte of space (that’s a trillion bytes or 1,000 Gigs) can be picked up for about half a c-note. You can perform backups and create system images, too.
3. Email
If you aren’t ready to go as far as trusting a solid state external drive with your files, you can always email them to yourself. For some users, this can feel like a safer way to keep your files to yourself. Email was actually the first cloud storage! Messages and shared files are retained on your account and you can store them in folders for easy reference just like a cloud service account and servers maintain the activities of sites like Google’s Gmail or Yahoo.
If you only have a few files, email can work for you. Most Millennials will have far too many files to store this way, plus you can only send so many per email.
4. Have some SaaS
Use online-accessible Software as a Service if you don’t want to have your productivity software permanently sitting on your hard drive. This can free up your space to run virtual machines for application and game development or to store space-consuming graphics software that is not available online.
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