What have you got hidden away in your computer attic?

NET RESULTS:The modern computer is the ultimate attic. With a terabyte of storage, there's little point in being neat, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

I WOULD not claim to be the neatest or most organised person in the world, but I blame the modern computer for turning me into a veritable hoarder.

I will confess that I am one of those people who always has stacks of newspapers and old magazines lying around full of articles that I mean to get to at some point. And nothing makes me happier than having a small pile of interesting books at my bedside that I intend to get to . . . eventually.

Don’t even get me started on my electronics box: the place where I stick what must now constitute the Museum of Elderly Computer and Electronics Parts, Connectors and Peripherals. There are things in there that I don’t even recognise anymore – ancient dial-up modems, goldplated parallel cables that once seemed like a good investment, weird peripheral devices designed to scan business cards, connectors for long-dead digital cameras.

The electronics box lives in my attic along with many other things that I save for a day that will never come. The attic is like a metaphor for my bad conscience – I stick stuff up there in the dark, hoping it will go away by itself and I’ll never have to deal with it.

So it is somehow appropriate that I am reminded of all my storage secrets at the start of every year, when I poke my head through the attic hatch to return the Christmas decorations to their hiding place. January is the time for resolutions, and the moment each year when I vow to clear out the attic.

At least one can, with good will, attack an attic, as I did over the past two weeks, clearing out a dusty array of items that for some baffling reason I felt I needed to hang on to over the past decade.

After this military-like assault, I put out seven recycling bags and four bags of rubbish and felt clean and pure. Until I decided to do the same with my computer.

The modern computer with its cheap, vast storage is the ultimate attic. There is so much space that there is no real argument for spending the hours it would take to clear out your hard drive. When you can buy a computer with a terabyte of storage – unthinkable a decade ago – what’s the point in being neat?

The modern computer makes it very easy to stuff things into the attic, so to speak. Mail programs come with automatic archiving commands, so all you have to do is click and a little file is stored with compressed versions of all your correspondence.

Downloads all go into their own folder where you don’t have to look at them and you will probably never realise that you clicked the button on the browser 10 times because you didn’t notice the document had already been downloaded – not to mention

the fact that you forgot you had downloaded the item two weeks ago so you now have 11 copies.

How scary is your pictures folder? I bet it’s like mine, full of duplicates and accidental blurred images – the kind of shots you would have thrown in the bin back in the day when you got your little wallet of printed photos back from the chemist.

These days, we tend to just download the whole mass of images each time off our digital cameras because it takes too long to delete the unwanted shots on the camera itself and then it takes too long to delete them from the picture folder. And anyway, why bother when you still have 40 gigabytes of storage left?

Despite all this, following the successful manoeuvre on my attic, I was inspired to have a go at cleaning up my desktop Mac.

I started with my mail, which had in the vicinity of 10,000 e-mails that I’ve been meaning to organise. Yeah, right.

I archived them. Then I deleted them, keeping only the previous month’s mail in an attempt to keep track of recent commitments and correspondence.

One look at my hard drive, though, and my will failed me. I couldn’t even face my desktop, littered with dozens of items going back years. I shut it down and went off to read one of my saved magazine articles.

But who cares? The whole miserable mess on my computer is all automatically archived to a 500GB external hard drive. The sad thing is that it means I could delete everything on my hard drive today, and I bet I’d miss none of it tomorrow. Probably like most of us.

Welcome to the digital hoarder generation.

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Twitter: Twitter.com/klillington