Driving back from a business meeting yesterday I caught up on a series of great podcasts from one of my favorite radio program guys, Kojo Nnamdi. He’s on NPR and does a lot of local politics shows, which do not usually interest me, but he does a weekly technology-oriented show which is excellent. The most fun is a monthly show called the Computer Guys & Gal. I listened to three weeks of his shows in a row and they dealt with data backup, power consumption/waste of all the different devices we have in the house, and some other things. The result was an overwhelming validation of how complicated I’ve allowed our house to get in the technology domain. It also costs/wastes a lot of money and more importantly time.

This is happened in part because I’ve always been an early adopter. I also don’t like to throw away things that are still useful. And I have a lot of creative pursuits that are linked to computer files and devices. Rachel keeps very good records. Between Rachel and I we currently have 4 desktop computers, three laptop computers, two smartphones, and they all do something. That doesn’t count IPODS, TVs, digital cameras, a Kindle and some other stuff I know I’m leaving out. Let’s not even talk about remotes. Some of the computers have multiple drives. I have an external drive, and a couple of cloud storage accounts along with a self-hosted set of email accounts and a gmail account. This is a subject worthy of the ‘too many directions’ tag; in this case it is “too many digital directions”. A subtitle would be something like ” are more choices and more options really more better?”  I say no. Discipline in this sense will set us free.

Last month I started thinking about a big part of this problem, namely, what we use each computer for and if we really need it. One is on it’s way out the door already. That was an easy sacrifice…not like the Abraham/Isaac situation that’s probably coming. Next came some rules on what data gets stored where. We have a network, so that is easy. (By the way we have three wireless routers and four wired switches throughout the house.)  Only two computers will be “allowed” to store data. Business/financial goes on one (Rachel’s desktop) and media goes on another (my fast desktop with the big disk in the basement). By “allowed” I mean if it goes anywhere else it does not get backed up. I’ve pretty much finished moving things around. The third PC (my study PC) will manage all the backup.  Do we really need three desktops? Probably yes, until we get some better heating in the study and Rachel doesn’t mind me working with headphones on, but that’s a subject for another day.

This morning I’ve been swinging the mental scythe against what data gets backed up where. I’m considering data that gets saved somewhere against the chance of a home disaster as well as what data gets saved somewhere so we can get to it from a laptop.  I’m also considering why I have this problem and other people don’t seem to. Or at least why I spend time thinking about it and they don’t. I decided I could avoid this if 1) I didn’t do creative things with music, photography and movies, 2) we didn’t keep good financial records, 3) I didn’t want to follow my pursuits from anywhere in the world or 4) I could accept the outcome of losing all the information if/when any of a handful of bad things happens to my house or my hard drive. I’m 0-for-4 on the previous points. That can also be the subject for another day.

So it was an eventful drive home. It got me going in another new direction, but in this case it is good. It takes effort to simplify. This partially a Sherman-march-to-the-sea approach and partially a thoughtful deconstruction. I’m willing to leave a few burned fields in my wake knowing that the new grass will appear quickly.