Organizing my digital life – Part I

Over the last month I’ve become slightly obsessed with organization and backing up my files. I’m not sure where this obsession is coming from but I’m on a mission.

Until the “if-something-goes-wrong-with-my-computer-I’m-screwed” induced flutter in my stomach goes away, I’ll keep trying to make my life more organized and easy to resuscitate if I ever lose my hard drive.

Backup on DVDs

The first thing for me to do was actually back up everything on my computer that I wanted to keep. I don’t know about you but I’ve had hard drives fail in the past and lets not even mention the time I had such a bad computer virus in 1999, it caused me to weep for three days because all of my University papers were lost.

With these kind of experiences, you would think that I’ve learned from my past mistakes. I have, to some degree, but I’m not as good about my back ups as I should be and this was starting to worry me.

So, the first logical first step was to back up all my files to DVDs to ease my immediate anxiety. As my DVD burner is working away and I stare intently as the percentage completed indicator slowly makes it way over to the right, I am once again thankful that I ditched my CD Burner and installed a DVD burner instead. I even bought a dual layer DVD Burner but I haven’t been able to get the dual layer part to work yet, I think I need to buy a different type of DVD media.

As I pull out my third and final DVD (after checking it to make sure that everything is OK of course) and place it in my weird and bulky CD case, I’m reminded that I should pick up a slick binder to hold all my computer media. Still, my three DVDs are way better then the 8-9 CDs I used to need in the past.

With this step done I felt a little bit better, but now was the time to really start organizing my digital life.

Taking Inventory

My next step was to create an excel spreadsheet of all the software I have installed on my computer. It’s a pretty simple spreadsheet with the following headers:

• Software Name – Name of the software
• Product Key – most of my stuff is freeware but some I’ve had to register so I need to keep those numbers
• Description – A short description of what the software does
• Installed – Date installed
• Uninstalled – Date uninstalled and why I uninstalled it
• Website – Software’s website
• Backup – Where I mark where my backups for each of the programs exist. For common freeware apps like FireFox, Thunderbird, Avast etc I don’t bother backing up on a DVD and just enter WEB in this column and a link to the download page. For other software where I have the original CDs, I enter CD. Then I have a bunch of small software gems that are not common but I use fairly often so I back those up on DVD because I don’t trust them to be around for long. Those I enter DVD

When I was done I stored the spreadsheet both on my computer and in my Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I feel much better knowing that there is a copy of this document stored offsite.

I also took this opportunity to uninstall old software that I didn’t use anymore.

The flutter in my stomach eased just a little bit but not nearly enough.

Rather then bore you with a massive entry about my organizational obsession, I’ve decided to make this a series. You’ll have to wait until Part II to see how I organized my “My Documents” folder and set up Google Apps for my domains to help with offsite backups.