by Jordan Cropper

Created on: March 12, 2010

The internet is a fantastic thing. The content of millions of libraries, trillions of books, unimaginable amounts of information, all very literally available at your fingertips. However, there is one problem with all this information being available; if you’re like me, a lot of it will very swiftly end up on your hard drive. If not dealt with, it will very soon devolve into a mess of files that get in the way of finding what else you need and are inevitably impossible to find when you need the downloads themselves. Fortunately, there are ways of dealing with this information tsunami that will help prevent you being swamped with masses of files that you really needed to download, but have now forgotten why.

Firstly, the best cure for this download addiction is, as always, prevention. Sitting back and asking if you really need the file you are about to download is probably the best way of making sure that your computer does not get overwhelmed by downloads. If you know that you will only need to see the file once, then you still have similar options; a few common formats, such as .pdf files, can be opened inside of your web browser, so you won’t need to actually save them to your disk yourself, and your computer will automatically tidy them away once you are done with them.

However, if you still need, or at any rate end up, downloading large numbers of files, then the best method for dealing with them is really the simplest; file them! Set aside a dedicated folder for dealing with downloads. Some Operating Systems already have one set up; Vista users, for example, will find theirs under C://Users/<username>/Downloads. Inside this folder, create other folders that you can use to further file things that you download. You might create one for Work related documents or email attachments, another for any software you download, and so on. The point is to make finding your downloads easy and logical, rather than being a tedious trawl through dozens of unsorted files if you can’t quite remember the filename, or a similar wait for a search function to complete the trawling for you.

Even if you already have a downloads folder, my advice would be this; clear it out, and set up a logical filing system like the one outlined above. If you are sure that you don’t want to lose anything in your downloads folder, transfer it all to an external drive, or place files you don’t want to lose but won’t be needed soon in one or multiple ZIP archives. Clearing it out will make it better for you manually finding things, but it will also make any computerised searches a good deal faster, as they now also have to trawl through less information to find what you want. Indeed, if you have a good filing system, you can probably beat an automated search programme that is trying to find the same file in a disorganized system!

In short, try to keep on top of your downloading habits. I know seems pointless or silly, but it will make it easier for you and may save you time in the future; there’s nothing more annoying than waiting ages for a file to download only to discover it was lurking in a corner of your hard disk all along. Once every while, just go through the folders with a hand hovering over the delete key; if you regularly prune your downloads folder, it may not sprout flowers but it will certainly help you in the long run.

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