Digital File Triage Pt. 2

Last night when I got home from work I fired up the computer and set about the (somewhat daunting) task of putting all my image files into one place. It was strangely rewarding to go back through folder after folder of images usually from a certain point in time, review all the pictures and delete the ones that I didn’t know why I kept in the first place. Blurry photos, bad photos, there were some that I couldn’t even figure out what they were supposed to be of. Sometimes I’ll keep images like those if they look sufficiently creative, colorful or interesting – but for the most part they went into the trash. I ended up with far less than I thought, and retained only the best. Its much easier to delete poor quality photos if more than a year has past, so I would highly recommend getting rid of the extra its and bytes you’ll probably never look at again. I was able to move all the images into renamed folders on the external hard drive, but before I delete them from my computer I burned them onto a DVD. I was surprised that all of them fit onto one DVD, but I’m not complaining.
Onto those network storage folders. Um, where was I? Maybe some music needs to be playing. Ah, yes – back to pencil and paper. One network storage folder is set as a personal folder and one as a “departmental” folder, the problem in the past is that I run the “department” – so in essence they have both been serving as personal folders. I’ve mapped out what would be considered only relevant to my personal work versus the work of anyone performing my duties in the past or future, which made it a bit more simple to separate things. Staffing goes into departmental but professional development goes into personal.
(time passes, things are deleted and things are moved around)
Folders have been created for both the personal storage and departmental and now its a lot of moving files between the two. Most of it is simple, but there are a few very nestled folders with what looks like a billion files, some are duplicates. Right now I’m listening to Eazy-E, which is quite funny. Working through the billions of items I’m finding a lot of them can be deleted since they’re out of date, but there are some key documents that are being moved up t he hierarchy where they’ll be more readily accessible. Well, my brain is starting to turn to mush, but things are falling into place.