I can usually stay on task when I’m at the computer, but today I fell into a black hole. A really deep black hole. I got a new computer a month ago and at the time I only transferred the files I needed. I kind of forgot that I have an old computer with 2TB of information that I need to comb through.

I hopped on the old computer today to grab a file and that’s when I fell into the black hole. The black hole of combing through old files to determine what I actually need to keep. It’s looking through thousands and thousands of photo files and making sure I have them on the new computer. It’s looking through the folder labeled “Old Mac” which then had a folder within it labeled “Old desktop” from a computer before that. I just kept shoving files in folders and transferring them to new computers and never went through them. Don’t judge!

So I spent hours today cleaning the hard drive and deleting almost 1TB of data. Over 100,000 files. Evidently I was really worried about losing 2010 photos because that folder was duplicated 4 times on the hard drive. As of 2012, I’ve cataloged photos in only one space and then that space was backed up to the cloud. But before that…it was the wild wild west. I had everything in Lightroom and then backed up in several locations. It’s a mess to go through.

Some of the gems I came across:

My photography business from way back when – I had all all my marketing materials for that and many of the photos.

Old clients logos. Yep had all those too.

Steve’s 27 versions of his resume. Including cover letters for old job prospects.

Receipts for nothing important dating back to 2006.

Old stock photos from who knows what project but they are definitely dated.

Instructions to the diaper bag I made when Hallie was a baby.

Are you starting to comprehend how deep this hole was. I’ve still got a little more to go through but I made a large dent and I’m here to say that digital purging is just as satisfying as physical purging.

I was only mildly distracted when I came across cuteness like this:

Admittedly, I did watch a couple too many videos so I could be reminded of their small squeaky voices. But it was worth the extra time!