Computer storage overused

Daily Finance

Jan 2nd 2010

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Computer distributor Zycko has launched its Storage File Analyser, a software tool that tells companies what they're doing with their computer systems - and found businesses are cheerfully wasting about 80% of their disks.

The reasons are many - unarchived mails, files kept 'current' when they hadn't been looked at in six months and others which hadn't been modified for even longer. There is a fortune to be saved through good housekeeping here.

And if this is true of corporate computing then it's even truer of the small business or domestic varieties. How many emails do people keep in their in-box at any one time, and how many notes to the milkman are still kept in Word?

Good housekeeping

It's definitely worth archiving mails older than a few months, and using an utility such as WinZip to reduce the size of files you might want to keep for contractual or legal reasons but don't want to look at much.

This sort of archiving will keep them accessible without taking up much space. Another option is to use an external disk drive - maybe burn your accounts to a CD so they don't take up space on your main computer.

The issue has become particularly acute in the home market with the advent of music downloading and ripping of CDs to MP3 files. Although an MP3 will reduce the size (and quality) of a CD's music, en masse they take up a lot of space.

Home users have therefore started watching their music and video collections very carefully, and their storage needs have multiplied.

Move to the cloud?

One possible solution is to take mission-critical data away from the home computer and put it into the cloud. Google Docs or for a small fee its more sophisticated sibling Google Apps will let you word process, spreadsheet and present as much as you like, using Google's space.

Music services such as Spotify allow this for entertainment, and you can even have TV and film on Blinkbox or BBC iPlayer and its contemporaries for more recent output.

The end result should be a computer that lasts longer, rather than one that appears to need replacing simply because it's full.