This is not really maintenance, anyone who can use internet well enough to find this website has enough knowledge of how to maintain a computer.
What this is about is how do you manage your old files?
Do you periodically format or do you sort out your old files every once in a while?
I’ve fallen in the habit of sorting my files and it’s getting tedious and it worries me.
What if I delete a file I thought was useless to end up I would have a use for it like 2 days later?(Which happens periodically) What if I delete downloads I might have fun looking back into in a decade?
How do you guys manage that?
I have a program I use to clean junk files. I’m kind of a minimalist when it comes to what I have on my PC. I remove games and software after I’m finished with them. Comcast has Cloud storage that I use when I need to.
Tinfoil Hat: BUT THEY CAN SEE YOUR FILES!
Me: I’ll be sure to put a bunch of pictures of my ass.
My laptop is a different story, though. I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck about my laptop. I pretty much just use it as a Graal-file storage device.
I manually sort through and organize my files. anything I want to permanently save/archive or use on multiple computers I write/burn to DVD-Rs I of course wait until they are in 4gb+ folders/batches before writing them as to not waste space. I then store those DVD-Rs in a 100 sleeve case which then goes into a hard and heavy as hell solid steel filing cabinet that can survive anything. you can’t accidentally delete things from a DVD-R or other optical media that is not RW the only way to get rid of them is physical destruction. A guy name Wrz also known as CoolKid98 taught me about optical media and a bunch of other stuff in IRC way back in like 2003 or something. I used to use Nero but now use ImgBurn for most things.
I also have the common stuff like flash drives, CF cards, external hard drives, internal hard drives and some networked computers with hard drives sharing stuff.
in total I probably have 6 terabytes of non-duplicate useful files, everything from Netscape Navigator 3 to pictures of a cat licking my head.
Fun random fact: The smallest hard drive I’ve ever owned was a 20mb 5.25, sized Winchester drive it was like 2 drives deep and weighed like 10lbs. The first “porn” thing I ever saw was a ASCII nude lady from a CGA keno game. not sure why I’m mentioning that… Storage is easy, organization is easy, just remember anything you send to anyone else can and will potentially be everywhere else.
Have a download folder on a secondary hard drive with a shit ton of junk files and I occasionally use a program that finds and delete duplicate files. My dropbox is organized with pretty much everything I need, like any programming objects are sorted by language - as well as android/ios folders… idk, maybe i don’t download that much junk never seems too hard.
When I reformat I usually backup the entire HD to one of my hdd’s minus the windows folder, and set my documents folder to a folder on dropbox. Pictures/music/videos on another hdd.
I basically partition my drives so they can be divided into size specific folders and then just sort downwards. Ex. E:\Images\Reactions\FuckyouOP.jpg. My anime drive is only 30GB so that I don’t start hoarding. My biggest problem is how to sort my music folders. I generally sort the albums by artist, but it becomes a problem when two artists have worked on an album at the same time. D:
but yeah, deleting files? I don’t really have much of a reason to do that unless they’re videos. It’s 2015. lol