sarahmichelef

Probable causes of major HD bloat:

My SentMail folders. Hadn't been cleaned out since summer '03. And on top of that, for some reason, snowplow had decided ot keep 2 and 3 copies of many of my outbound messages. Damn. Thousands and thousands of messages, just waiting to be deleted. Some not-huge but decent-sized attachments in there, too.
Mailing list mail folders. I should clean these out, too. I store them on my HD so that my UMass mail account doesn't go belly-up for lack of available space (which was a twice-monthly occurence when I was Rose Fellow and getting 500-page book manuscripts via e-mail attachment... and all the editors would get the same message and then they'd all forward it to me so I'd have something like 8 copies of that one attachment sitting in my inbox).
I had a bunch of .tiff files sitting in the directory for the course I'm teaching right now because I was using screencaps in my lecture slides. I always delete those when I'm done with the PP for that lecture, but I backed up mid-lecture. Ergo, lots of big graphics files hanging around and backed up when really they didn't need to be. Oh well. ;^)
Also: I have a folder called "articles" that contains 30 megs of .pdf files of academic articles that I don't have hard copies of. This is of course on top of the electronic copies of all the course readings for this semester, which is another 190 megs (there is, however, some overlap between the two). Probably what I'll end up doing is waiting 'til I have a whole CD's worth of articles and then I'll make sure they're in EndNote and offload them to a CD, with a note in the EN citation telling me what CD they're on. (Gee, that would make SENSE or something.)

I am dorque. Jeremy and I were commenting to each other a couple of weeks ago how we really need our own personal work-study students just to manage our libraries. And if we're this bad as graduate students, wait 'til we're actualy grown up academics! No wonder my Caucus tag is "infowhore".