Digital hoarding...there is a cost.

Physical Hoarding….. we all do it in some way, shape or form – You just need to drive down your local street an peer into the open garages as they sure as heck don’t have cars parked in them! Something about human nature where we don’t like to get rid of stuff. Admittedly some people are worse than others but our justification around it is the same….. I’ll use it “one day”

The same goes for digital hoarding, but let’s look at it from a business perspective. Digital transformation, a buzz word that’s been lingering around like a pesty fruit fly for quite some time now where businesses are endeavoring to move to a paperless “utopia”. Gone are the days of having large rooms full of filing cabinets storing hundreds of thousands of documents. Last time I checked office space was an expensive commodity so there is definitely a cost associated to this “storage”. We are creating so much digital content on a daily basis, so in essence are we now just moving the problem somewhere else? And why does it always become IT's problem to sort out, this is data and document management 101. We are all responsible.

Yes, there are cases where documents need to be kept for a certain amount of time based on legal or legislative requirements. But what about the stuff that doesn’t? As we all know, digital storage isn’t free, especially when we are talking terabytes and terabytes of it, and yes while there are some “cheep & deep” options out there… it still attracts a cost. Not only a cost to store it, but in many cases this stuff is being backed up as well… over and over again, sometimes to multiple storage mediums.

I've seen some file shares containing file data from 1997 (That's twenty four years old) Its 2021, so I'm pretty sure it's no longer relevant... just hit that delete button and be done with it.

Dedupe technology is doing a great job reducing multiple copies of files, and compression is doing the same at making them smaller (where possible), but it makes no sense to do so on file data that is no longer needed!

So to wrap up, keep things tidy people… and if you were wondering how much data is created every day? The current estimate stands at 1.145 trillion MB per day. Some other very interesting data stats here How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2021?