“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
There is a house in my neighborhood that I think of as the hoarder’s house. In the 20+ years I’ve walked by this house, it has been filling up with stacks of boxes which I can see through the dining room window that is near the sidewalk. And once the boxes hit the ceiling in that room, they started to spill out onto the front and back porches.
I think I’m fascinated by this house because what I’ve noticed in my computer consulting business, is that we are becoming digital hoarders.
When I started in the business, IT departments largely operated the nuts and bolts of company software on servers in one or more data centers. When a server failed, ran out of disk space or software had to be upgraded, there was a very real cost of having to buy and insert some new hardware and plan software upgrades. Because of that, companies made hard choices limiting the amount of data to be stored.
Now a great deal of the companies I work with have their operations to the cloud. Email, collaboration software and more are all run by a 3rd party who provides all the hardware and software management. All companies have to do is sign up for a plan and it usually comes with a large amount of data storage with an upgrade to more space just a click away.
The result is that companies don’t have limits that encourage people to throw away digital assets. Often times, deleted items go to a deleted folder that essentially becomes another filing system.
On the unseen side are the huge datacenters that house all the hardware and software. These datacenters often sit in locations where electricity is cheap and the data center can be cooled. For instance, there’s an enormous Microsoft datacenter that sits by the Columbia River in Washington State because of its proximity to cheap hydroelectric power and water. (To be fair, Microsoft has pledged to be water positive, replenishing more water than they consume by 2030 so I’m thankful for that corporate conscientiousness.)
This goes for the personal software we use as well. Companies that store our data run redundant data centers which we appreciate when we want to access a file, picture or song at any time of day or night. But these data centers require a massive amount of electricity, cooling systems and hardware. A 2015 article in The Atlantic quotes a 2013 Facebook sustainability report in which Facebook reported that its data centers used 986 million kilowatt hours of electricity that year. The article points out that is the same amount used by entire country of Burkina Faso in 2012.
Thinking of all the places I store data – iCloud, Amazon (books, movies and music), Shutterfly (photos), Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Docs, WordPress, Facebook and Instagram to name just a few, many are free or charge a small amount to increase storage limits. For a picture that I like, it sits on my phone, is backed up to iCloud, I might post it to Instagram, upload to one a site to make a calendar for my mom, another site to make my yearly photo album and use it in a WordPress post. That’s 6 copies of one picture and I’m rarely incentivized to remove any data and so I don’t. I’m a digital hoarder.
Yesterday when I walked by the hoarder house, I saw a young woman sitting on the front porch taking what looked like a much needed break in the sunshine. There was debris all around her that made me think she was cleaning out the house and sure enough, there were no boxes visible in the dining room window any longer. Many of us don’t want to leave that kind of physical job to our friends and family when we die – but we need to consider doing the clean up of our digital assets as well.
Do you delete digital files? I know Ashley just posted that she consolidated and removed old posts that weren’t getting any views – but does anyone else do that?
(featured photo from Pexels)
Surprised By Joy 