When you store your life online, it’s easy to become a data hoarder. But the stuff you store carries a financial and environmental cost — here are three ways you can cut down your digital clutter and reduce your footprint.
Financial costs of data storage
Years ago, it seemed every online service included tons of online storage. But lately, it feels like the generosity is shrinking. That’s because the amount of data we’re all storing has skyrocketed. After all, data storage isn’t free — even if you’re not the one paying the bill.
At the consumer level, iCloud and Google One each cost about a dollar a month for 50 GB of cloud storage. When you start thinking of big organizations, it’s easy to see how data storage can get expensive, even if consumer and enterprise costs aren’t exactly the same.
The scale of data storage is beginning to cause ripples in higher education. For example, Google recently announced that it will end its unlimited free storage for higher education institutions and will start enforcing a 100 TB limit per domain. When you divide by the number of potential users — like the 13,000 employees and 32,000 students at UNC — that’s just 32 MB per user. Affected universities are reducing how much users can store, paying for additional storage or migrating data to other platforms. And other providers, like Microsoft, may soon follow suit.
Cloud storage has environmental impacts
“The cloud” is really a data center. And data centers, which house servers and other equipment for data storage and processing, aren’t as eco-friendly as the name “cloud” implies. It turns out that these centers consume a lot of energy.
A series of reports from Goldman Sachs estimate that data centers currently account for 1-2% of worldwide power consumption, but that number may rise 160% by 2030. According to these reports, the rise in power consumption is due to two factors — diminishing returns from previous energy efficiency efforts and the rise of generative AI.
Beyond the power usage, data centers also require a lot of water for cooling and generate a lot of electronic waste from all the computers and servers they use. Our growing appetite for cloud storage and generative AI is creating a data center boom. So when you store more data than you need, your environmental footprint grows.
3 tips to digitally declutter
Cloud storage and automated backups are good things. But the convenience makes it easy — maybe a little too easy — to be a data hoarder. The good news is that you don’t have to go on a data diet all at once. Here are a few tips to reduce how much you store.
First, find some easy wins.
Some deletion decisions are tough, but starting with the oldest and biggest files can make those choices a lot easier.
For example, in Outlook, click the dropdown arrow next to the search box and enter some dates to identify old emails that can be trashed. Or, try searching for the word “unsubscribe” to identify old newsletters you don’t need. Most emails don’t take up a lot of space, but some do. In the expanded search box, check “attachments” to find and delete the storage hogs. You can do similar searches in OneDrive. Try sorting by oldest to newest or sort files by file size, then select descending. This will help quickly identify your best bang-for-buck deletions.
Second, set yourself up for success.
Good naming conventions will make it easier for you to identify things you can delete in the future.
If you always write “draft,” on your working docs, that’s something you know to search for — and delete. You can also move files to a dated “archive” folder. Periodically, check that folder and sweep unneeded files into the recycling bin.Third, get in the habit of trashing in the moment.
It’s easy to become a data hoarder when you default to storing everything. In the moment, take a moment to think — do you think you’ll need this file in the future? If not, trash it!
You have 30 days to restore deleted files in OneDrive and SharePoint, so don’t be nervous to get ruthless. If you need it in 30 days, it’ll be easy to recover the file, but chances are that your gut decision will be the right one.But before you delete, check your retention requirements
Before you delete files, double check if you need to retain them. Everyone is responsible for managing University records, according to the instructions in the University of North Carolina General Records Retention and Disposition Schedule.
The retention and storage policies are the rules and guidelines that govern how long and where you should keep your data. You should consult these schedules to determine what data you need to retain, how long you need to retain it and when you can dispose of it.
One easy thing to delete, even for items covered by the retention policy? “Transitory records,” like to-do lists or calendar invites that have minimal value after the action has been completed. Things like drafts or notes that are “gathered or created to assist in the creation of another record” are public records but can often be destroyed after the final version of the record has been approved.
By following these tips, you can become a more responsible data user and avoid being a data hoarder. Remember, less is more when it comes to data storage.