I’m spring fall cleaning my digital life. It is truly incredible how much digital junk one can collect and how many digital chores exist. And just like the offline world where every new acquisition of an item leads to extra work (cleaning the item, taking care of it, insuring it if appropriate etc.), every user account, every digital image and every blog needs work.
The volume of data is just ridiculous. Let’s start with email – I started sending email in 1993 (CompuServe baby!) and while I don’t have those emails, I have email dating back to 1995! Maybe it is because I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to email, but sorting through, categorizing, importing, archiving and ensuring the email is in the right format (making all the Windows emails Mac compatible) has been quite a task.
Then there’s the music. A few years ago, R and I combined our music. We have over a 100 gigs of it… figuring out a solution where we can both share the music but keep it in sync has been a huge challenge. It still doesn’t work all the time, but at now, we set up a Mac Mini as a shared server and plug the music drive in to share it. Works most of the time…
Photos have exploded this year. And again, it’s something we want both people to have access to. So, you need to tag them, sort them and ensure the memory cards are downloaded. Oh, the tags have go cross platform (windows and mac). And if you shoot in RAW, you need to convert them to JPGs to store them on your computer and the “negatives” can remain on a hard drive. Damn, the work flow is complex!
Online passwords have to be maintained. I have no idea the number of sites where I have passwords, much less which email I used with it and what on earth the password even is.
Oh, and le blogs… is it so hard to pop open a tab and update it? Not really, but given all the other digital cleaning I’m doing, I’ve felt overwhelmed and reluctant to post…
And given all this digital organizing, the real world organizing has taken a back seat. So for a few weeks, I’ll have to focus on that and while I do, my digital stuff will get messy again. So I will focus on the digital for a bit again and while I do that… the cycle of life… argh!
Picture from the Apple store