Spring Cleaning Your Electronic Device
When spring rolls around, many people are
eager to bust out their vacuums and dusters for some spring cleaning. But when you’re doing all the
sweeping and scrubbing and tying of loose ends, don’t forget about all the
digital devices you use every day that could use some attention too!
As digital technology has become more
assimilated into our lives, it’s become more and more important to be a
diligent and responsible operator to ensure your devices run quickly and securely. When you’re doing your spring cleaning this year, remember to follow
these tips for your electronic devices!
Change
Passwords
You have probably heard about the importance
of regularly changing the passwords for your devices and online
accounts. Ideally you should change your passwords every 90days, but at times
it can be easy to forget to do so. It’s a good idea to use your spring cleaning
endeavors as another call-to-action to change your passwords.
When creating your passwords, try to integrate
upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols into a word to make it more
secure. For example, ‘Gr@ssh0pper44!’ would be a more secure password than simply the word
‘grasshopper.’
Avoid using special dates, names of spouses,
children, relatives, or pets in your passwords as these are associated
with your identity and thus can be easier to hack. Never reuse passwords
between accounts and keep your passwords stored in a secure place, like a
password bank.
A password bank is an application that stores
all your usernames and passwords securely in one place. If you opt for a
password bank, you will only have to remember the password for the password
bank to access all your login information.
Review
and Delete Files
Especially on smartphones with less memory, it can be easy
to use up your internal storage space quickly, preventing you from saving files
in the future and potentially slowing down your device. When you’re doing your
spring cleaning this year, take a few moments to view the storage on your phone
and computer to see if you need to delete any files to make room for others.
The storage capacity for most phones and
computers can be found by navigating to the settings. Many devices will break
down your storage into categories, depicting exactly how much space you have
left and what applications are using what memory. Some
devices may even have settings to automatically remove or compress applications
and files that are accounting for an amount of your storage but aren’t being
used.
If you see that one of your applications – for
instance your photos or music – is using up a lot of your memory, you can then
navigate to that application to delete unnecessary files and free up some
space.
If you are having a tough time deciding what
to delete and what to keep, you can consider purchasing an external hard drive
or additional space on the cloud to give your devices more storage capacity.
Backup
Your Devices
When you’re spring cleaning your devices, it’s also an
opportunity to back them up. Backing up your device is when you save your files
and programs and all your saved data to a destination separate from your
device, like the cloud or an external hard drive, to decrease the likelihood
they could be lost.
Backing up your devices is important because
if something were to happen to them, such as being broken or stolen, you could
stand to lose all your files and data if it is saved only on the device. But if
you backup your phone and computer to the cloud or an external hard drive and
something were to happen to them, you could replace your device and download
your backup to regain access to all your saved data.
Make an effort to regularly update your backup
file so that you are keeping things up to date. If you neglect to backup your
device for a long time and it breaks, you could still download your old backup
file but you would lose all of the data that was saved after it was last backed
up.
Spring cleaning your devices also means being
prepared for a worst-case scenario where they are broken or stolen. By backing
up your devices, you can rest assured that your files can be readily accessed
even in a worst-case scenario.
