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A client in Denver asked me to fix a 'slow' computer that was actually just full of old family photos
I was at their house last month, and the machine was a ten year old desktop. They were ready to buy a whole new system, but when I opened the file explorer, the main drive was completely red, with less than 1% free space. It was thousands of photos and videos, just sitting there since 2015. I asked why they never backed anything up, and they said, 'I thought it was safe because it was on the computer.' I spent an afternoon moving everything to an external drive and showing them how cloud backup works. The computer ran fine after that. It made me think, how often do we see this same basic issue that people think needs a big hardware fix? What's the best way you explain data management to clients who aren't tech savvy?
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xenagarcia1mo ago
That exact thing happened to me with a neighbor here in Phoenix. Their laptop was so slow it was unusable, and it was just the main drive packed with over 20,000 photos from a decade of vacations. They were about to drop serious cash on a replacement. I get the "safe on the computer" idea, it's a common trust in the physical machine. I try to explain it like a filing cabinet that's so stuffed you can't open the drawers to find anything, and you need a second cabinet for the old stuff.
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Classic case of digital hoarding. I just tell them a computer is like a closet, you gotta clean it out sometimes or the door won't shut.
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