On Cleaning A Hard Drive

This morning, upon having the luxury of a vacation and not going to work, I took the opportunity to organize my hard drive.

This is a task that I have sadly been lacking in.  My computer is giving me those handy shout-outs that say "Hey, you need more memory!" - and yet I have never found the time to sit down and actually go through the lengthy process of actually cleaning up the hard drive.

Why?  Because I am a pack-rat of my own materials, and going "electronic" solved absolutely nothing in that regard.  Whatever I create on the computer, I tend to keep - in fact, I think we still have old 3.5 inch disks from our Apple with things I created 20 years ago because I have this crazy idea that somehow, somewhere, they might be useful to me.

But the time came.  And the time was available.  So data transferring we went.

I still continue to get rid of very little, of course - instead, it all gets transferred on to other memory sticks, where it will at least take up less space until (once again) the technology changes and I am left with sticks of documents that I can no longer access.  And going through the actual process is a great deal like reading a diary of sorts:  as I organized and moved and transferred, I can see the various trains of thought I was following, the projects I was trying to set into place, the ideas that were set up on electronic paper yet never seemed to move beyond a certain stage.

They are all transferred now, the "current materials" on my hard drive, the other materials safely archived for a day which may never come - in a way, a reflection of so much the activity that fills our own lives, where that which was at one moment important loses criticality and eventually is transferred to the back of our memory or to our garage or closet on the off chance that someday it may become critical, although too often in our head we already know that it will never be.

It is just that we cannot bear to let go of it.