May 11
In today’s high tech world we are often pressed for time. Speed, accuracy, efficiency are all at a premium. Taking short cuts are just a fact of daily life. However it only takes that one lapse in judgment, accidental deletion and you’ve got a major headache on your hands.
Working on that “big project” and suddenly find out you’re running out of hard drive space. No problem, just clear up disk space by deleting some “useless” files. Before you press the delete key the one thing you should consider is: do you have a backup?
Rather than simply highlighting and deleting those seemingly redundant files, how about making a copy of them to a USB drive or a CD? Then safely delete the files from your hard to drive to free up the necessary space. This way you can examine those files at a later date. There might be some important information in those files you may have forgotten about.
The truth is that it’s better to be safe than sorry. One of the best practices you can emulate is keeping multiple revisions of frequently modified files. All with different files names (yes, remember to use that SAVE AS function) preferably by date.
When it comes to digital information it is good to be a virtual pack rat. Keep everything, delete nothing, or if necessary move data to other media formats. Implementing good data storage habits can help you avoid data disasters. So before you press that delete key … make sure it is data you can do without.
Category: helpful hints, data loss prevention
Tags: best practices, data protection, deleting files, file erase
