Subscribers to our Eco Church Newsletters would have received information about a Digital Clean Up workshop that took place on the 15th March, hosted by Global Shapers, a group of young people that Arno is a member of, and with whom we do some joint eco actions. I (Sue) went along to the workshop and am very happy that I did so. Below are some tips for those who have a google account.
- Go to one.google.com/storage and check how much of your free 15GB you are actually using and where.
- You can click on clean up storage for a quick way to see what is used where. This will give you an overview of the big items, but there are ways to be more ruthless.
- Apparently in Switzerland, 80% of emails go unread. Gmail has a handy little filter button in the search email box. Here you can select unread emails, and based on the probability that you will never read them, especially old ones, then you can do a mass delete. Otherwise skim them and delete.
- If the above seems too scary, you can start with the social and promotions tabs. Most promotions are short lived, so they are safe to delete, especially all those you never even read, but also a lot that you have read.
- On the right hand side in the menu, under more, you will find a tab labelled manage subscriptions. This is something google offers, and you can unsubscribe to newsletters at the click of a button.
- Once you have cleaned up your emails, then move onto photos. Select storage under photos and Google will show you possibilities between blurry photos, or large photos and videos as well as screenshots. Selecting any of these categories opens up a selection of photos to review and delete if not needed. Note blurry seems to be a bit of an arbitrary term. Either that or all my photos are blurry.
- Videos take a lot of space, and how often do you ever view them? I know, never, so just delete.
- Finally Google drive if you use it for storing documents. Select drive, and them select My Drive in the menu on the left. There you will see what documents you have stored there, and which ones you can safely delete.
At the end of the process, and once you empty the bin, you will be able to see how much space you have released. In our workshop, one girl went down from 14GB to 3GB, mainly through deleting unread emails.
This has several benefits. Cloud computing costs energy running those servers, uses water, and emit CO2 emissions, your few GB might not be making much difference, but you are still doing your bit, plus you won’t need to pay for extra storage.
PS, you can read more about this here. Or read our Lent newsletter on the Eco Church page for more tips and info.
In addition you will speed up your devices, make them last longer, and have a clearer overview of what Emails are in your inbox, or photos and documents on your drive. Maybe now you can get round to putting your photos into virtual albums, or making that photobook that you have always wanted to do.
Author: Sue Higson