When am I ever going to use this?

My laptop just informed me I’m running out of space on my hard drive and suggested I get rid of old or unused files to clear space. My desktop had been running slow so I thought I’d defragment that hard drive to give it more room to move and found out I didn’t have enough free space to run the defragmenter.

Back in August I read an interesting article from the BBC about Americans’ obsessions with their crap – Have Americans lost their taste for more and more stuff? I told Brett it was an interesting commentary not just on our current economy, but also how other cultures view our countries need to hold on to everything. We can easily get our car into our garage. But earlier this summer we watched the people in the house across the street spend a week and a half cleaning the garage, have four days worth of garage sales, and they still can barely move around in their garage let alone get a car in there.

Turns out there is more than one way to hoard though – you can be a virtual hoarder. It’s easy to hide that hoard because it’s all tucked away on a hard drive or a few disks somewhere. But as both my desktop and laptop have informed me recently, it can make it hard to maneuver in your electronic world.

With my desktop I set about to pull infrequently used files off it to clear up some space. I went through six years of photos, deleted the ones I didn’t care to have any more, and burned the rest to DVDs. Barely made a dent in my memory usage. Next I tackled all the videos I’d made and got those to DVD as well. I finally had just enough space to defragment the drive. But there’s still a long way to go.

I like to blame the slowness of my desktop on its age (I bought it at the very end of 2004), but the fact that it is being held back by all my files, many I will probably never look at again, more than I’d like to admit in duplicate form (between the laptop and desktop even), probably has a lot to do with it as well.

Do I need to burn them all to DVD and then have to keep track of a stack of DVDs so I can fill up my hard drive all over again? Or should I get better at determining what is worth saving and what I can electronically forget and move on from? The latter will probably be a better option both digitally and maybe even emotionally.

It’s a new form of the question “When am I ever going to use this?” The answer for algebra is a lot more often than high school students want to think about. The answer for that file tucked away in a long forgotten folder – probably never.