Every year about this time, millions of people spend hours or even days cleaning up their computers. They weed through mail, files and other data, trying to determine what is to be kept and what should be deleted.
I suggest NOT cleaning. Sure, you can ORGANIZE, but why risk losing an important file?
External hard drives are inexpensive and easy to connect, as in plugging in! Then you can use the built-in archive functions in your Microsoft Outlook to move mail to a .pst file that can be saved to the USB drive.
I also advise using MULTIPLE means of archiving, whether it is a DVD disk and a USB drive, or two USB drives, just something that will be stored elsewhere. You could try one of the various cloud computing solutions as well, like DropBox…
With files stored on your system, say in the Documents folder, you can sort them by the date they were last modified and then move them to an external drive. Again, having data in more than one place is always desirable. You can never have too many backups in my humble opinion!
What do YOU do to archive your data, mail or do you? Do you just delete it?