Spring break means trips for families.
It also means spring cleaning.
The same applies to the tech gadgets and services in your life. They need as much care and maintenance as any of the other tools in your life if you want them to work safely and efficiently. So make time to wipe off winter's digital grime and get your household ready with five tech spring cleaning tips.
1) Clean up your passwords: Passwords, whether for email accounts, online stores like Amazon or even PIN codes for smartphones, are like door locks on your home, except that gangs of thieves are going around with a huge set of keys trying to see which key might fit into your home's lock. That means it's important to change your passwords on a regular basis, at least once every six months. If you can spend an afternoon washing the deck, you can take an hour and update all your passwords.
Do not use the same password for all of your accounts. That's like having the same key for your house, storage shed, cottage, mailbox, all of your cars and bike locks. Do not use, as many people apparently still do, obvious choices like PASSWORD or 12345678. That's worse than keeping your household door open with a neon sign outside saying "ROB ME."
To make passwords easier, use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password to randomize your passwords and store them securely where the thieves can't get them.
2) Back up your stuff: Just as you might safely store old photo albums and family keepsakes in the attic, you should make at least one copy of the digital files that form the core of family memory in modern life. The photo gallery on your laptop from last year's summer holiday when Uncle Charlie was still alive? Copy it to an external drive. If your laptop is stolen, destroyed in a fire or simply goes dead as a brick, those precious memories will be lost forever.
At the very least, back up your most important files to a USB stick and keep it somewhere safe. Better still is to back up all your important files to a drive you store at the office or in a safety deposit box. Even better, in addition to the physical drive, back up your files to online storage services like Google Drive or Onedrive, or dedicated paid backup services like Carbonite.
3) Give your computer an oil change: Your car needs maintenance in spring to help it run smoothly for the next six months. Same with your tech devices. Update the operating systems of your computers, tablets and phones and the apps they run. Update the security software. Modern systems like Windows 8 and Android will update your systems automatically by default, but make sure you haven't turned that feature off.
Updates help your devices run better and keep them safe. Last month, Apple (yes, Apple) announced all of its devices had contained a horrifying security hole for some months. Apple has issued updates to fix this hole: go update your iPhone. Now.
4) Sweep up digital clutter: You might have taken 246 pictures of that summer holiday with the late Uncle Charlie, but chances are you need a quarter of those as keepsakes. And trust me, you will never, ever look at most of those pictures again.
Take a morning this spring break, grab a coffee and go through your digital photo galleries. Delete the ones you don't need. You'll free up valuable drive space, make your home gallery easier to use and make the remaining pictures more meaningful.
5) Recycle unused gadgets: Tech devices are some of the most offensive consumer items around for purposeful obsolescence, and as consumers, we're trained to purchase the next shiny gadget that comes along. That means we're steadily acquiring a small closet of perfectly good gadgets we don't use anymore.
Don't keep them around and don't send them to the landfill. Recycle them through an appropriate agency (see return-it.ca for a list). If you've got unused computers or computer parts, donate them to Free Geek Vancouver (freegeekvancouver.org), an excellent non-profit which recycles unused computers and parts for people in need. Everyone deserves a clean spring.
Barry Link is editor of the Vancouver Courier newspaper. [email protected]
