The Invisible Costs of Storage

When the world went digital, so did our filing cabinets. Cloud storage became so easy, so invisible, that many of us lost track of which files were where and how much digital stuff was crammed in our cloud storage. In the digital realm, the associated costs are obscured by the physical disconnect from the files, but they are looming on the horizon. 

When we retain nearly everything, our ability to find what we need when we need it is excessively complicated. This waste of time is costly, so is the increasing price tag for cloud storage itself. There is also a significant cost to our environment:

Without a strategy for managing and culling digital content, a large percentage of our digital storage is unintentionally saved in perpetuity. These files are functionally becoming a floating “garbage patch” in the ocean of cloud storage. 

ITS has been attentive to the growth of digital storage for years, managing storage on local servers and thoughtfully adding Cloud Services as applicable. We’ve continued to balance need, cost, and the environmental impacts of our digital footprint. Below are some of our more recent initiatives to help individuals and the college manage digital storage.

• In 2021, a group of 17 individuals who combined to reduce their collective storage by 1.05 TB by using the steps on the File Lifecycle Management page!  

• In the winter of 2022, we held workshops, entitled Managing your Digital life, during which 63 faculty and staff participants deleted unwanted files from their own digital storage.

• At about the same time, we identified a broadly used internal email service called Carlslist. The number of emails sent and received were in the tens of thousands, and most included pictures and attachments. By targeting and removing outdated Carlslist emails, Carleton was able to remove approximately 2 TB of storage. 

Culling digital content is an ongoing process, and it requires each of us to be deliberate in our preservation strategies. It has also become clear that Carleton needs to think more carefully about how long we retain files that were created by faculty, staff, and students who are no longer with the institution. Those files currently account for 25% of our Google storage. 

To address that issue, ITS and college leadership have concluded that 5 years after students graduate, we should delete files that they created and shared with others. This policy will start with this year’s graduating seniors. We expect to extend this policy to all faculty and staff at a later date after some reflection and the creation of outreach around the use of Google Shared Drives which makes the files owned by the college rather than an individual.

Now is the time to reach out to your current or former student researchers and student workers, to make sure that their files reside in the Google Shared Drives (which are owned by the institution) or that ownership has been transferred to an individual faculty or staff member. 

Watch for updates on this topic, which will include tutorials for preserving older files that are still needed.

As we all become more attentive to the impacts of our storage, the key is to maintain an intentional approach to managing of our digital storage. The Store Smart page has activities for thoughtfully accomplishing this task.

Please reach out to the ITS Helpdesk for assistance beyond that provided on the Store Smart page.