Computer clean up

How often do you clean up your computer?

Royalty-free cartoon styled clip art graphic of a desktop computer cartoon character

Do you schedule your computer for regular maintenance? Do you think of it as an important appliance for your memories with all of your digital photos and videos or is it simply a convenience to have so that you may surf the web and receive the occasional email? Whatever it is that you use your computer for it is probably worth a little time on your part to keep it working to the best of its capabilities. I know that I have had some catastrophes in the past where I have almost lost all of my photos, and videos, so I have learned what it is to maintain a computer regularly, and back it up in the (impending) event that a hard drive fails, or that the computer starts to react slowly.

SO what are some of the things that I have learned?

1. Always back up your data
   The manner in which you back up your data is up to you, however I would like to make some suggestions at this point. If you have en external hard drive that is close to your computer, I would like you to consider using either Time machine backups for a Mac, or a similar product for the Windows world known as Drive Cloner (™)  or even Rollback Rx (™).
   One then that you may want to consider is an offsite option that will help you to have extra peace of mind, and the "cloud" options that are available these days are very affordable. Check out BackBlaze for example as it allows you to backup all of your data (even your external hard drives for as little as $5.00 per month. If you do have a crash or a worse scenario like a fire, or a natural disaster that wipes out your computer, you have full access to all of your files over the web for free, or on a thumb drive for user $100, or all of your data on a hard drive for under $200. BackBlaze will even ship those last two options right to you. The bonus here is not only peace of mind, but also convenience. There are other options out there, and you can find them using your friend Google:) The point here is that you take action right now to be certain that you are backing up your data right now. This is important because the fact is that ALL hard drives WILL Fail!
   Let me repeat that for you:
   ALL HARD DRIVES WILL FAIL
   Why is that important to understand? Because most of us are under the false presumption that hard drives will last forever. The truth is that most will only last 5-6 years at the most. (I know right now you are counting back to the date that you bought your computer, and figuring out if it is as older than 5 years-- if so stop reading this right now, and BACKUP all your computer data right now!)
   So if you have a system in place and you are confident that you could easily restore ALL of your data and important images and videos, then you can read on. If not, do something right now to make this situation better. Email me to ask what sort of help you need.
2. Always schedule a cleanup hour once a month. Put this into your schedule, and make certain that you do it for the sake of your computer and your own peace of mind. During this hour you can run Disk Utility on the Mac, or CCleaner on the PC. This activity is like regular maintenance for your car, as it will help to make your computer run better, and help to make your computer last longer.
   Also one thing that I recommend for all of my clients and friends is that they clean up their Desktop so that there is ONLY shortcuts to documents or applications on the desktop. The one thing that most people don't realize is that your computer needs to allocate virtual memory to have things that are prioritized as important (your desktop) available to you quickly. If you end up using all of that virtual memory to load up 2000 of your documents on your desktop, you will not have any left to run any of your other programs. So clean up the desktop by moving unnecessary files to a folder that is within your documents folder. Any important documents that you use everyday can be "short cut-ed" to have an alias on your desktop, and the original file can live in your documents folder organized the way that you like. If you need a video to show this, please let me know, and I can add one in here! Once you are free of clutter on your desktop, then be sure to run your disk utility or ccleaner to get rid of caches, and to help your hard drive to be properly organized.

If there is anything else that you can add to this, let me know and I will add it to this post.

Thank you for reading this and I hope that it helps you .