by There are well over a million files on my Mac. Sure, a few hundred thousand of those are components of OS X itself or of the apps I’ve installed. But, still, the number of user-generated files I’ve accumulated over the years astonishes me.
Most of the time, those files just sit there minding their own business, bothering no one. But sometimes, say, when I do a Spotlight search for a document and thousands of potential matches pop up, I start thinking a bit of file-simplification is in order.
When I do a Spotlight search for a document and thousands of potential matches pop up I start thinking a bit of file-simplification is in order.
Now, in this context “simplify” could mean “delete”—but it doesn’t have to. I might need a certain old file only once in a span of several years, but that doesn’t make it safe to delete. Depending on the context, simplification might mean reorganizing files, creating archives, offloading files to an external disk, or other strategies. And, of course, it would be easy to get carried away with this sort of thing and spend endless days looking for every last way to optimize one’s files, but that’s sure to produce diminishing returns. Instead, I suggest concentrating on the easiest and most fruitful kinds of simplification.
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