Zero Data: Reducing the Storage Clutter

Humans are,
by nature, packrats. And while I’m sure there are exceptions—and yes,
I’m jealous if this is really true of you—most of us, even those who try
to behave otherwise, inevitably fill up all the space we have, often
with items we don’t ever need.

I’ve spent years now trying to overcome this
trend. While the overreaching desire for change is certainly pragmatic,
some it is more short-term, while some is long-term. On the short-term
front, my family swaps homes each year, most often with another family
from Europe. And allowing people you usually don’t know to spend weeks
in your home has a way of focusing your attention on the clutter. So
each year, we intend to clean out ever more clutter in a meaningful and
deliberate way. And each year, we do a bit of that, and then have a last
minute spaz in which we toss a lot of clutter into bins and put the
bins in the cellar or in closets.

Long-term, my wife and I interested in a
simpler, smaller lifestyle. Today, we have kids in school and various
needs around the size of the home (which, by the way, is quite modest by
U.S. standards), the car, and so on. But as enthusiastic travelers,
we’re interested in a more mobile lifestyle in the future, with a much
smaller living space, hopefully no car, and much, much less “stuff.”

(Our interest in this future was renewed
by Mary Jo Foley, who co-hosts Windows Weekly with me. On a recent trip,
she was telling me about her pragmatic policy of taking something out
of her small New York City apartment every time she brought something
in, and that this way of thinking of things helped clarify what was
really important, and what wasn’t.)

With all that in mind, welcome to my bedroom.

What you see here are two bins full of
clothes. My clothes, ostensibly, though I haven’t worn any of them in
years. I mentioned previously that, before each home swap, we bin up
items we don’t want cluttering up the house while we’re gone. So each
summer, I toss the dresser-based clothes I’m not bringing to Europe in
these bins and tuck them in the back of the closet.

I’ve noticed something about these bins. I
don’t ever need any of the clothes in them. Like, ever. In fact, those
bins—which, yes, are literally still sitting in the corner of my bedroom
as I write this—aren’t from last year’s home swap. They’re from the
2011 home swap a year earlier. Those clothes have been sitting in those
bins for a year and a half. I literally don’t need them.

So I’m going to throw it all away. Yes,
I’ll look through the clothes one last time, because you never know. But
this is clutter and a waste of space. It’s unnecessary, but it’s
something I’ve held on to. You know, just in case.

Digital data storage is exactly the same.

And while I will spend a bit of time in
the future writing about some of the ways in which I can and will be
converting physical items into more portable digital items, the simple
truth is, clutter is clutter. And if you’re anything like me, you’re
storing too much crap that you’ll never ever need again. And this is
true whether it’s on your PC, a centrally-located store on your home
network (home server, server, PC, NAS, whatever), or in the cloud.

And I really do think it’s worth spending
the time to figure out what it is that you’re storing, and where, and
when you can either permanently delete as much as possible to reduce
your storage needs or at least foist it off to what I think of as “deep
storage” that you will most likely never access again.

That deep storage can be cloud-based—like Amazon’s Glacier service
or similar—or it can be as low-tech as one or two external hard drives
that you toss in a safe deposit box or some other location that’s not in
your house. (And yes, that’s important.) Your aversion to risk will
determine what you can and cannot do. But I’m always amazed by how much
time, energy, and money we waste micro-managing our digital content.
Part of this Zero Data initiative, for me, is ensuring that I’m not
babysitting storage any more. I want technology to work for me, not
vice-versa.

So far, I’ve been pretty general, and haven’t offered up much in
the way of specific strategies, let alone specific products and
services, or what I’m doing and using. That will come in the near
future. But there are hints to what I’m doing all over my writing. Last
year and beyond I wrote a ton about storage, sync (which is key, I
think), cloud/online services, and so on, and the path is pretty clear.
What’s needed is some hard thinking about what it is you really need and then taking the tough steps to get there. As I noted in the first article in this series, Zero Data: The Hardest Part is Saying Goodbye,
that first step is often the hardest. But you need to get over that
hump before you can reduce the clutter, both physically and digitally.
And this year, I’m all about doing both.