Port-to-Port

I spent several hours on a plane today, which gave me a chance to catch up on some reading. One of the things I read was a NY Times article from December that claims that American data consumption has grown by 350 percent in the last three decades to a whopping 34 Gb per day. The rate continues to increase by 6 percent per year.

Now I don't know why they did a 30 year comparison, but I do know the amount of data we save is growing far faster. Perhaps it's because, like me, people are saving stuff they hope to get to during their next plane ride and the trips aren't coming often enough. All I know is that the size of the disk space we install in new servers for our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers gets larger and larger. Still we frequently have to contact our network support clients to let them know that they are nearing the end of their storage capacity and need to purge old information. 

Often, our IT support services clients will ask us to do this for them. By the time we call we've already done all that we can do without having some detailed knowledge of the value of their data. We invoke the "one man's junk is another man's treasure" excuse to avoid causing unhappy results.

If it's been a while since you cleaned up your files, take some time to do it now. There is stuff there that is taking up space that you will eventually have to replace. It's also getting backed up regularly, taking time and resources. And it might be causing some of that low level anxiety you feel when you set out to find a piece of information amid all that stuff.