Thursday, August 12, 2010

Shred, Delete, And Shred Some More

Tomorrow is Friday at last. It is supposed to be 101 this weekend unfortunately. I am wishing the Fall would get here quicker. I am tired of running the air conditioners non-stop and I am tired of the electric bills although they are only $85, not as much as I had expected. I have a friend in Phoenix with a big house and her bill is around $380! Wow. If she got solar installed a $20k system would pay for itself in 5 years or so.

Work went by pretty quickly. Since our office is moving soon we had a shredding company come and shred up all of our old files. 900 pounds of paper. It took less than 30 minutes. I also got a notice from the IT people that my email was taking up too much space. I had to delete a bunch of them. I am really bad about organising my email outside of Outlook. I like to keep it all together so that I can search through it when my boss is looking for an email that is from 3 years ago. First I closed my eyes and deleted all of my "sent" emails. Then I went after old emails with attachments that I had already saved on to our server. I hope I got rid of enough. I don't want another hand-slap from IT telling me I am hogging too much space. I still have a lot of email and if I don't go through them and save the important ones, they will be lost forever when I quit or when IT demands that I delete them, whichever comes first. Its a tedious job but then most of my job is tedious so that's nothing new.

3 comments:

Dave said...

I had a frequent storage problem in my final few years of working. I would get those "You have exceeded your space limits" auto-notify emails all the time after the IT people lowered the server space limitation per person.

I would store my emails on the hard drive in 6-month folders. Usually, doing a move from the server to the HD every month was good enough. But then I had to do it every two weeks if I started getting emails with large attachments. It became a cat-and-mouse game after a while, and one which took up more time than I wanted it to when faced with these limits.

I could not do these moves if I were out of the office, as I was working part-time in my final years. Thankfully, I never had my email privileges suspended when I temporarily exceeded these limits but it was often tough to find emails I could delete if they were more recent than one year which I kept on the server at one time.

Leaving work has not made this space problem go away, however. I have been getting close to my own HD limit at home. I need to keep at least 10-15% of its space free or else my system gets really slow all the time. And I have an 18GB HD. I would hate to have to get a new HD and reload Windows and all my other stuff onto it.

Daizy said...

I will be glad when those emails mean nothing to me. I will just walk away and leave them behind.

KoBold said...

Dave,
why not add another HD to the system?
Older units of 40-60-80 GB should be easily available from retired but not discarded computers collecting dust in - e.g. - friend's garages.