Organizing inside the computer

The world is changing and if you are like most people, a large portion of your life is inside of your computer. Can you easily locate your digital tax returns? Your resume? Photos of your grandson’s birthday party? Clutter can be found on your computer as well as your office.

Every time you save a file, download a picture or save an email, it goes into a folder on your computer. You can tell your computer where to send things so that they go where they should. Or, once you have downloaded or saved items, you can move them to the places where they belong.

Just like your home can become cluttered, you computer hard drive can do the same. A cluttered hard drive can slow down your computer. Do you need all of the photos you took at an event? As you go through the files, pick out the ones that can be trashed and others you might want to save on an external drive or CDs. Empty your trash too, it can accumulate a lot of files.

If hard disk space is at a premium, you will need to externally store some of your files to free up space. For those lucky people with a lot of space and not a lot of documents, you can keep the files on your computer and do external backups from time to time. Attach an external backup drive to automatically backup your computer on a regular basis.

Cloud service is a mystery to many. Think of it as an offsite hard drive that you access from your home computer. By utilizing a cloud service, your files are safe in the unlikely event of a fire or other disaster that may damage your home. Using your longin information, you can access the files from any location with internet access and from any computer.

For files you want to save, but do not need to reference on a regular basis, you can store them on CDs. A letter you wrote last year to someone and you want to save a file copy can be saved to a CD as it does not need to take up space on your hard drive. The same goes for some photos.

Organize your folders like you would physical folders in a file cabinet. Divide them into personal and business. Some useful categories might be photos, music, documents, programs and downloads. Within each folder you will have sub-categories. You can color code the folders if that helps you.

By organizing and backing up your computer files, you will have an easier time finding files when you want them. When you look at your folders, if they are in list form, you can arrange them by name, type or date or switch them to suit your purposes. You can also use the icons instead of a list. This is a personal preference.

Organize your computer in whatever way makes sense to you. If you are the only person who uses the computer, it doesn’t matter what method you use. Arrange things the way in which you can easily find what you want. Get into a routine and stick to it to keep your computer tidy and running smoothly.

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