Digital decluttering made easy: 5 tips for the best strategies

More space & more security

Tip 1: Remove unused software

Outdated and no longer needed software solutions not only take up space on servers and client computers, they often also represent a significant security risk. These unused and mostly unpatched programs offer hackers a welcome gateway with which they can gain access to other areas of the IT infrastructure of a company. Take advantage of the quiet days between the holidays to take a look at the software installed on your devices. With the Windows “Add or Remove Programs” tool, you can quickly see how much storage space each installed program is using and can quickly and easily remove software you no longer need.

Even small animals make messes

Tip 2: Clear out email inboxes

Undoubtedly, not every email you read can simply be deleted; after all, electronic correspondence is also subject to certain retention requirements. But hand on heart – how many of the countless newsletters that flutter into inboxes every day are actually read and not just saved for an “I’ll read that later” that is pushed further into the future? An enterprise search solution can be helpful in separating the wheat from the chaff and declaring war on mailboxes that are far too large. Enterprise search solutions allow you to intelligently search and filter data sets (emails, files, database entries, etc.) based on their content in all storage sources in the company. Such software can also be used to find and filter emails according to a wide variety of criteria. Subscriptions can be found and canceled quickly and emails can be easily cleared out.

Tip 3: Avoid attachments – save storage space & CO2

Brochures, reports, offers, contracts, photos – many documents not only live on file servers and PCs, but also bloat the mailboxes of senders and recipients.

“The same document is often found in multiple versions, sometimes with different file names but the same content, on company servers. Many of these duplicates were sent as attachments,” says Christoph Wendl, CEO of the Viennese IT company Iphos IT Solutions. “It is safer and more resource-efficient not to send documents that are required again and again, such as product photos and brochures, as attachments, but rather to make them available via a link to a file sharing cloud storage. The documents can then be read or downloaded by the recipient without burdening mail servers in countless copies. For confidential documents, you can also work with password-protected access,” continues Wendl.

An email with a large attachment causes around 50g of CO2, while the CO2 footprint of a simple email with a link is only around 5g. If you avoid sending attachments directly - for example by using a file sharing solution such as shareit based on Nextcloud - you not only save storage space, you also do something against climate change.

Halali! Duplicate hunting on the mail and file server

Tip 4: Find and clean up duplicate files

An often complained problem in organizations is the multiple versions of the same file, which are often scattered across different data sources under different names and thus successfully resist their decimation. Top-level enterprise search solutions can help here. The enterprise search software offers searchit The current version of the Austrian software manufacturer Iphos IT Solutions also offers a plugin for storage space management that is dedicated to hunting down duplicates.

A specially developed algorithm checks all documents connected to the search software for duplicates. The searchit The algorithm calculates a so-called checksum for each document and stores it in the index. If a checksum exists multiple times after indexing, these are exact duplicates of a document. Even if a copy of a document has been moved to a different location, sent as an attachment, or renamed, searchit Detect duplicates across all connected data sources – whether on the file server, mail server, web server or on the PCs.

“Finding duplicates was a request we often asked to expand our search solutionit. This is where a lot of storage space is lost in most organizations. This costs money in purchasing additional infrastructure, but also in the energy costs for the ongoing operation of the servers and storage solutions. In times of rising energy and hardware costs, this is a not insignificant factor,” says Wendl.

Tip 5: Tackle the biggest problems first with a better overview

As is well known, you first have to become aware of a problem in order to be able to tackle it. However, organizations are often not even aware of what has accumulated in the various data stores over time and how much data storage needs to be used for this. The enterprise search software search scores points with its storage space visualizationit also in the graphical representation of the occupied data memory. Regardless of whether the division of duplicate documents should be displayed as a percentage or based on the storage required - the “Storage Management” plugin enables structured tidying up of data storage. The deletion of files that are no longer required can optionally be carried out using a four-eye principle. Every deletion request must be approved by an authorized user.

Every day is a good day to start mastering data chaos through a streamlined structure. The approaching turn of the year may motivate you a little more to actually tackle digital decluttering and start the new year with tidy data storage.