Deletophobia
I've always been a bit of a pack rat, but in the past few years I've managed to get over a lot of my tendencies to hoard physical things. I've culled and purged and recycled and donated and have learned to love the process.
But the idea of deleting anything digital is horrifying to me. I still have emails in my work Inbox from 2001, when I started my job. Every once in a while IT tells me I need to delete things from my email and here's what I do. I find all the emails with large attachments, save the attachments to my computer, and delete the email. Problem solved, right?
Today my computer told me that I only had 245 MB of free space on my hard drive, out of a 93 GB capacity.
I was hoping Flickr would help me with my hoarding instinct, by letting me feel like I can delete the photos off my computer after posting them. But not only have I not been deleting anything, but it's only exacerbated the problem by encouraging me to take more photos. My 2006 photo folder is 2.05 GB, my 2007 photo folder is 13.4 GB.
I was able to clear a few gigs off my computer, but something tells me this is only a temporary fix. I clearly need help.
Comments
I have gotten very good at keeping the hard drive clean.
Then again, I don't really back-up any photos on my computer, which, when I think about it, makes me seize up in terror.
I was gifted with an external hard drive for my birthday and it is making me feel a bit better. Now I'm slowly backing up only the photos (and other important documents) I really want to keep to it. External hard drives are small so it would take about 10,000 for you to fill up the basement. :D
Posted by: jane | 2:58PM, 10.18.07
Looking at a file, you must ask yourself:
Is it shit?
And then delete it.
Posted by: Wil | 4:19PM, 10.18.07
If I deleted everything I thought was shit, I'd delete it all the instant it's created. I need to let things sit for a while before I can let my inner editor judge it because I am extremely critical of myself when I first create something. I post 10% of my photos on to Flickr and often go back weeks or months later and wonder why I didn't post some of the rest of the 90%.
Unfortunately, I never seem to go back to the pile and sift through it when I'm able to be less critical. And now there's so much to go through, it's overwhelming.
Posted by: andrea | 4:37PM, 10.18.07
I'm much the same way. I've dealt with this problem by acquiring many, many, extra drives and "backing up" onto them (where "backing up" = having 13 copies of everything with no particular organization). At last count our household had 2110 GB of hard drive space, and it never feels like enough. Overwhelming, indeed.
And so tomorrow I'm buying another external disc. That'll solve this problem once and for all.
Posted by: sgazzetti | 1:01AM, 10.19.07
I'm very careful about keeping and backing up things like photos, but I only keep a fraction of my emails: my account is very clean, my inbox never has more than ten mails in it, and I clean out my sent items on a regular basis.
Posted by: simon | 3:56AM, 10.19.07
Thought about investing in a DVD burner?
Posted by: Tracy | 1:55PM, 10.19.07
Er... I really have no excuses. I have a DVD burner. I just don't like burning things and then deleting them from my computer because then they're not instantly accessible anymore. As soon as I burned my photos from earlier years onto CDs, I basically never looked at them again. I am hopeless.
Posted by: andrea | 2:04PM, 10.19.07
Well, then let's call Cray and turn your basement into a giant supercomputer!
Posted by: Tracy | 2:41PM, 10.19.07
Please, please, can we?
Posted by: andrea | 2:47PM, 10.19.07
> Thought about investing in a DVD burner?
DVDs are like tiny little hand bags compared to the mover's boxes that extenal HDs are.
I have a total of about 15-20 Gig of data. That's everything. Except program data and installer files.
> I need to let things sit for a while
Hmm, yes, I let things sit if they're "not bad", but if it's crap I'll know it instantly, and then it's GOODBYE FILE.
I consider myself extremely critical too. That's why I have so little stuff compared to most people I know.
Posted by: Wil | 2:54PM, 10.19.07