How to keep your files small and organized on your new laptop

 

 

 

If you go to a library to look for a book, it shouldn’t take much time to find what you need. Of course, that’s because libraries are meticulous organized. And your laptop shouldn’t be much different: it’s your personal library of what’s important to you. The best way to keep up with your digital life is to stay organized, so let’s take a look at a few ways to sort your files and minimize your storage usage.

Keep your files small

When your files are disorganized, finding a specific document can be a needle in a haystack, even with the help of a Search function like Spotlight, especially if you don’t use a specific naming convention. Instead, keep an organized file and folder structure-even better if you can set up your folder structure from scratch when you buy a new laptop. There is no perfect folder structure, but the most effective ones allow you to: intuitively find what you need.

Be careful not to fill your computer’s read-only memory with unnecessarily large files. It helps to keep your files small, so zip them together when you can, for example if you migrate your data to a new round.

If you have a lot of data, a devotee file compression software is useful. Winzip is the most popular, but it costs about $30. Other file compression programs include 7-zip (arguably the best open source file compression option)), WinRAR, PeasZip, and zipware.

Change your default download location

Usually the default location when you download files is the Download folder on your laptop, which can get messy quickly (the files will out of sight, out of mind, but not out of your computer’s memory). Instead, save downloaded files in a different, perhaps more visible, location place-your desktop is a good choice, but you can choose aany other folder you want.

It’s easy to ignore or forget what you’ve downloaded, So every time you save a file, Select a folder Outside from the default location when the sounds logical. Yyou can too change the default download location of your browser. (For example, in Chrome, go to Downloads > Advanced settings.)

Choose a personal organization method

Usually you want a organizational strategy around either the date or file type. The good thing about a date-based file organization is that you can easily find files from a certain period, for example if you are looking for general bank statements from 1996, you can simply look up the year and then browse your subfolders. Or you can start with your own folder types instead, especially useful if you want to separate your personal files from your work files or other large data category, and branch your subdirectories from there.

Whatever you choose as your primary folders, the goal should be to create subfolders in your folders to hold similar files contains in a way that is intuitive to how your brain works. There is no right or wrong choice.