How to Effectively Manage Storage Space on Your Work Computer

One of the key factors contributing to your productivity at work is an organized workspace: your office desk, your home office if you’re a remote worker, and your work computer. While keeping your desk organized is easy (OK, sometimes not that easy), how exactly do you keep your computer organized? The answer is effectively managing your storage space and keeping your files organized. Here are some tips that will help.

Tip 1: Come Up With a System

An organized folder structure is responsible for 50% of your success. It’s up to you how you bring order to the digital chaos on your work PC but we’d like to share some ideas:

Organize by client - if you do work for a lot of different clients, organizing your work folders by client makes sense. You can create folders for various types of clients, subfolders for each client in the category, and project subfolders for each client.
Organize by project - if you work for a company, it makes sense to organize your files and folders by project. Create a folder for each project and subfolders as necessary.
Organize by date - some people love organizing by date to keep track of what gets done when. Normally, you’d have a folder for each year, subfolders for each month, and then it’s up to you to organize the rest of the subfolders. This file organization system works really well together with organizing by project.

Once you’ve settled on a file organizing system for your work computer, it’s time to manage the storage space on your PC and in the cloud.

Tip 2: Back up Your Work

Can you imagine losing all your work in one crash or hard drive failure? This is one of the worst things that can happen but the good news is that you can easily prevent it. Just remember that even a new computer isn’t insured against sudden hard drive failure and back up your work. A great way to do that is to use cloud backup services, store important files in Dropbox or on Google Drive, and remember to back up to external hard drives just in case so that your projects are available when you are offline.

Tip 3: Put Files in the Right Folders Immediately

Do you dump files on your desktop and download files to your Downloads folder? If yes, you should stop doing that immediately, especially if you’re using your work computer. Doing that creates a digital mess, provides fruitful soil for duplicate files (we’ll cover them in a minute), and even slows down your computer because files on your desktop take up RAM every time you open your PC.

When you save files to your desktop or Downloads folder, you’re basically doubling your workload when compared to saving files directly to the correct folders. So, why waste time and disk space on that? Change your browser settings to ask you where to save a file every time you download something and spend a couple of seconds browsing to the right folders. It’s really worth the trouble because otherwise you’re looking at wasting hours sorting through your downloads later on.

Tip 4: Remove Duplicate Files

And now let’s talk about the biggest time-waster that’s a consequence of saving files all over your drive: duplicate files. When you don’t keep a file organizing system on your work computer, you risk saving the same files twice or even multiple times in different folders. Don’t confuse these files with intentional backups - they’re useless copies that make things confusing and take up valuable storage space. They could also be wasting your cloud storage space and slowing down automatic backups. That’s why the best thing you can do to organize storage space on your work computer is to delete duplicate files, images, and emails. You can do it all with Easy Duplicate Finder - it has scan modes for dealing with duplicate files on your PC, Mac, cloud storage, and in your email client.

Tip 5: Use Descriptive File Names

When you’re naming your files, you can speed up future searches for the files by giving them descriptive names. A name like “Website graphics - Client X - January 2020” is better than just “Website graphics”. True, you’re going to save the subfolder in a dedicated folder but if you use the search feature to quickly get to the right project, the descriptive name will work much better.