How to Spring Clean Your Digital Space

The snow is melting, the trees are budding, and your home is fresh and organized after a thorough spring cleaning.

Time to sit back, relax and enjoy your hard work, right? Not quite.

Your physical space might be neat and tidy, but there’s a good chance you’ve overlooked one incredibly important area: your digital space.

That’s right, your digital devices need tidying up, too. And a fresh spring start gives you the perfect opportunity to sort through your digital trash and free up some space on your hard drive. It might sound daunting, but this task doesn’t have to be all work and no play.

Not only does organizing your files give you the chance to declutter, but it also gives you the opportunity to relive some of your most-loved moments from the past few years.

Just like cleaning out your closet and discovering that old shoe box filled with notes from loved ones, photos, ticket stubs and little trinkets, cleaning out your “digital closet” also gives you the chance to take a look back at some of your most precious memories – and realize why it’s so incredibly important to do a routine digital clean and back-up every so often.

In today’s world, we’re creating more digital content than ever before and it’s easy to get complacent thinking your valuable files are immune to disaster just because they’re stored on your computer or camera roll. But if you’re not backing up your irreplaceable files, photos and videos, there’s really nothing keeping them from poofing and disappearing into cyberspace.

No need to panic, though. We’ve put together three simple steps to help you clean up, get organized, and of course, back-up your cherished digital memories.

Start with the Trash

Just like you would with your physical space, the easiest way to clean up is to throw away the things you no longer need (like those 468 unread emails you still haven’t touched). But don’t get ahead of yourself just yet and hastily drag everything to the trash bin.

Instead, try tackling one area at a time – your desktop, inbox or photos – to make sure you’re able to actually sort through what you’re deleting. You never know if that email from four years ago contains important login information, or that photo from 2013 is something you really want to keep.

If you can’t bear to delete certain things, but don’t really know where they belong, create a folder specifically for miscellaneous files just to get them organized and out of the way.

Once you’ve taken out the trash, it’s time to really take out the trash. If you’re using a Mac, find the Trash bin on your dock, and click and hold over the icon to “Empty Trash.” For Windows®, locate the Recycle Bin on the desktop, right-click, and choose “Empty Recycle Bin.”

Organize Your Files

Now that you’ve sorted through what you want to keep and what goes, it’s time to organize what’s left.

Create a Filing System

While it’s not completely necessary, we recommend creating a system to categorize your files so you can easily access them in the future. Yes, this might take a little longer, but it’s worth it in the end.

When your files and documents are titled “UntitledDocument(36).jpg” and “39B7EG95-EP56.mov,” you’re just setting yourself up to waste time and get frustrated looking for them down the road. Instead, take the time now to go through your files and rename them based on the places, dates, people, or information the files and documents actually contain.

You’ll be so thankful for this step when all you have to do is search by keyword for a particular file, instead of scrolling through thousands of thumbnails to find what you want. This step will also make organizing your files so much quicker and easier, especially if you’re planning to move your files to a secondary location.

Choosing a Storage Solution

Once you have everything labeled and sorted, there’s a number of options to choose from when it comes to actually organizing and storing them. We tend to prefer using a personal cloud-based storage option like the WD My Cloud™ Home, which plugs directly into your router at home so you can save all your digital content across your external drives, mobile devices and computers in one central place.

The benefit to organizing your files on cloud storage or apps like the My Cloud™ Home (versus just keeping everything directly on your desktop) is that you can access, upload and share your content from anywhere you have an internet connection. The My Cloud™ Home also allows you to easily share and collaborate with others, like family, friends and colleagues, which makes it a great option if other people need access to the files you’re organizing.

On the flip side, the My Cloud™ Home also offers the option to create private spaces for each individual user, meaning you have the ability to share what you want, while also keeping personal files private.

Another awesome feature of using a personal cloud-based storage device is that you also get the peace of mind knowing your files, irreplaceable content and cherished memories are automatically backed up. So, in the case that something were to happen to your devices, all your hard work decluttering and organizing won’t go to waste, and your files will be safe and sound.

Don’t Forget the Backup

Speaking of something happening to your devices, this step can’t be emphasized enough: do not forget to back up your files.

Your invaluable memories, photos and videos can never be too safe. Even if you’re using something like the WD My Cloud™ Home, which keeps your files automatically backed up and regularly syncs your content, having more than one backup of your files is highly recommended.

In addition to a personal cloud-based backup like the WD My Cloud™ Home, it's a good idea to also keep your important digital belongings on an external drive. With read speeds of up to 1050MB/s1 and write speeds of up to 1000MB/s1, the My Passport™ SSD is a perfect option for anyone that wants to be able to quickly access and upload files.

This small but mighty portable drive takes up hardly any space and can easily be transported. It’s also shock-, vibration-, and drop-resistant, making it ideal for standing up to life’s demands and keeping your memories safe, no matter what.

You’re also going to want to look for something that offers password protection and hardware encryption to help keep your files and data secure, in the event that your storage drive is ever stolen or compromised. We love that the My Passport™ SSD offers password-enabled 256-bit AES hardware encryption, providing that extra level of security for your precious digital belongings.

Another huge plus to the My Passport™ SSD is that there’s no setup required. It’s ready to use right out of the box, so in less time than it would take you to dust the mantle, you can simply connect, easily back up your treasured memories, files and content, and cross this item off your digital spring cleaning to-do list.

1.) As used for transfer rate, 1 MB/s = 1 million bytes per second. Based on internal testing; performance may vary depending upon host device, usage conditions, drive capacity, and other factors.

Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, WD, the WD Logo, My Cloud and My Passport are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. Windows is a trademark or registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Pictures shown may vary from actual products.

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