Comments on: Hard Drive Hygene: Downloads Zero

By: Antony Jones

Antony Jones — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:59:52 +0000

You don’t visit a lot of taiwanese motherboard manufacturer’s sites, do you? ;)

By: Antony Jones

Antony Jones — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:58:56 +0000

Yes, this is exactly my approach. Desktop items constantly bug me, so I am constantly cleaning my ‘downloaded items’.

I’ve done this since I was 14, I hated the idea at first, but now, 14 years on, I could not do it any other way.

Robert, your method demands credit, but is way too risky for me!

By: Ingo Richter

Ingo Richter — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:12:03 +0000

Great Idea! After reading your blog post I had a look into one of my Downloads folder. On my Desktop machine there were 12G of data and files. Much more than I thought. And lot’s of really old stuff. Huge amount of wasted diskspace. Now I will do the same with my Downloads folder. Remove everthing that wasn’t filed accordingly (if neccessary at all) and gain more space for the important stuff. Thanks.

By: Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:52:42 +0000

@Barry

If I had effectively unlimited disk space on my network, I’d probably do the same: instead of deleting, I’d just move it over to a mounted network directory based on date. I’m not in that position, though, so I just wipe it.

I considered burning everything to DVDs every once in a while, but that seems like a pain and more hassle than it’s worth. If there’s something valuable which I may want later, I’ll just have to be pro-active about saving it or accept life without it. So far, I’ve been able to survive just fine that way.

By: Barry Kelly

Barry Kelly — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:55:17 +0000

Oh, and it’s a mistake to think you can download everything again. It’s can be hard enough to find many e.g. game mods and the like three or four years after the fact, never mind 10 or 12.