This column is BoomerTECH Adventures’ second annual New Year’s reminder to think about the “health” of your digital devices. Are they full of files and data no longer useful so that phones, tablets and laptops slowly become sluggish? Are you giving out-of-date apps a home that takes up valuable storage space?
These 12 tips will not only make your devices run better, but they may also save you some money. I pay for extra storage to Apple and Google because I am lax at cleaning out files and apps no longer pertinent to my life. They take up storage space on my devices, and thus, I often receive the message that I can no longer save a file or I find that an app just won’t work. So, take a few minutes and try out some of these useful tips!
1. Check for software updates. This year we have helped many folks problem-solve digital device issues. Just this week, BTA clients had uncooperative email systems and an iPad stuck in earphone mode. The “cure” or solution was to update their device. On Apple mobile devices, go to Settings and tap General to find software updates. On Androids, go to Settings, tap System and then System Updates. The process for checking for updates on your computer varies by manufacturer; do an internet search by your computer’s brand combined with the word “updates” to review how to update your device.
Remember, updates often include fixes for security problems, so it is prudent to stay current with all software updates.
2. Do some heavy-duty housecleaning in your photos app. Delete duplicates, trash substandard images and decide which photos are important to keep. Remember, our photos app is one of the biggest users of space on our device. Save storage space and delete those less important images.
If you cannot bring yourself to delete photos, never fear — there are solutions. DropBox, Google Photos and Amazon have free accounts. You can upload your photos to one of these cloud sites. Always read the small print. Sometimes uploads are not instantaneous, and there are specific steps for deleting the originals from your device.
3. Look closely at your home pages and app libraries, especially if your device is a couple of years old. Chances are you have an app or two that you no longer use. I just deleted 10 apps on my iPad — it took me less than three minutes. While doing it, I noticed that I must have 50 recipes saved to my home pages. I need to review them next! These unused apps take up storage space on our devices. Why keep them around? Delete them.
4. Check your settings. Software updates often cause your settings to revert to their original state. For example, I use Siri (virtual assistant) on my iPhone and iPad and had chosen the Irish male as my voice of choice. After the last update, the voice reverted to an American female. Not a big deal, but it was a reminder to check other settings to see if I needed to change any of them.
5. Have you reviewed your documents, especially on your computer? I just looked at my Documents folder — I have files dating back to 2014. We have to make hard decisions about what to keep. Some folks like to maintain records for everything, others don’t. I have recommendations I wrote in 2015 — should I keep them? Will someone ever want to check them or does that only happen in mystery books? I’m keeping them for now and pushing that decision off for another year. However, the course descriptions I wrote for adult ed in 2017 that are now totally obsolete, that’s easy — delete! Remember, these out-of-date or irrelevant files take up storage space on our devices that is often finite. Another option is to move them to an external hard drive if you just cannot hit the delete button.
6. Clean up your email. When I taught adult ed courses related to technology, participants would gasp when they saw I had 70,000 emails. Most folks do not go to the extremes I do. However, emails can accumulate, and one runs out of free storage space with their provider. Here are a couple suggestions for cleaning up your inbox:
Unsubscribe to companies and organizations that have acquired your email through purchases or donations. Usually, the unsubscribe button is in tiny, tiny print at the bottom of a message. Scroll down to find it, and click or tap on it. They will beg you to stay, but be ruthless and click on the unsubscribe button.
Secondly, use the search window in your email to gather messages from the same source so you can delete them in one fell swoop. For example, in the search window I type the name of magazine or newspaper I subscribe to and all of the recent emails from that publication appear. I select them all and click delete.
7. Organize your bookmarks and favorites from your internet browser (Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.). I am quick to bookmark recipes and interesting articles, and as a result, I have a long list of websites. I am putting them into bookmark folders — desserts, interesting apps, politics and so on. I will save myself a lot of time looking for the right bookmark once this organization process is finished. Take time this month and review your bookmarks. Can you organize them into folders? Are they still relevant? If not, hit that delete button.
8. Update your calendar app. Never miss important dates like birthdays and appointments again. There are a couple of birth dates I never remember. I finally got smart and put them in my calendar app and set it to remind me every year. I can even put in alerts a week ahead of time in order to get the card in the mail on time.
9. Check your texting apps. Our texts and the images and videos we attach and receive take up storage space on our devices. Review these apps and remove any text threads and media you no longer want.
10. Change your passwords. If you are a Facebook user, I’m sure you are seeing posts from friends saying, “I’ve been hacked. Do not accept friend requests.” We all know there have been spectacular incursions into supposedly secure sites by hackers who liberate passwords and sell them on the dark web. Identity theft occurs too often. The best advice from the security folks includes: (1) Do not use the same password on multiple sites. (2) Use strong passwords that include numbers, symbols, and upper- and lower-case letters. (3) Do not use 123456!
11. Check the settings on your social media accounts. When Facebook or other social media change their software, our personal settings often revert to their original status. Take a minute to check the privacy settings on your social media accounts. They determine who can see your posts.
While you are looking at your social media account, you might want to review your postings (photos, texts and links) as if you were a prospective employer, landlord or someone doing a security check. Or think about your posts as a legacy. Are there pictures, comments or memes you would rather your grandchildren did not remember you by? Have you posted anything that could be misinterpreted or changed in a negative way? Think about the number of times we have read an attempt to discredit someone because of a piece they wrote in college 20 years ago. Remember that with the advance of “deep fake” software, innocent pictures/videos can be altered into just about anything. Google “deep fakes examples” to see a multitude of examples.
12. Finally, think about which files should be in a cloud account like Google Drive, Drop Box or OneDrive. A recent article in the Washington Post suggests that scanning documents like your deed, mortgage closing documents and wills and saving them to a cloud account is an excellent preventative measure in case property is destroyed in a cataclysmic event.
Kashmir Hill in a New York Times column “Your Memories. Their Cloud” also addresses the issue of what to do with your important files. She quotes archivists’ advice, “Archivists regularly cited the ‘3-2-1 rule’: three copies of everything, two copies on different cloud services and one at home. Some also said to keep yet another copy ‘offsite,’ i.e., at a relative’s house or in a bank lockbox, depending on your level of paranoia.”
Both articles are worth a read as you review your use of digital devices and tools.
Take the time to be a good steward of your digital devices’ health and prune away the dead wood of out-of-date files, apps and photos. Your devices will thank you.
BoomerTECH Adventures (boomertechadventures.com) provides expert guidance and resources to help Boomers and older adults develop competence and confidence using their Apple devices. Boomers themselves, BoomerTECH Adventures rely on their skills as educators to create experiences that meet individual needs through videos, Zoom presentations, tech tips, and timely blog posts.
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