Reducing your carbon footprint online

There are many ways to reduce our carbon footprint – some easier than others. However, when it comes to making a difference with our use of the internet and clouds, there are a few simple and worthy ways you can act right now.

Whenever you upload a file to the internet and cloud, it gets saved on a physical data server – and they use power, a lot of power, not just to keep them up and running, but to keep them running at the right temperature.

So, simply put: less files stored online equals less data servers equals less carbon footprint!

 

Mobile Phones

Most phones are now set up to automatically back up your photos in the cloud (iCloud, Google Drive etc.) and that’s of course a good thing, as it means you no longer have to remember to back up your photos manually.

However, these backups contribute an estimated 355,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide ever year (Institute of Engineering and Technology).

So, whilst the auto backup function is brilliant for the photos we don’t want to lose, a big portion of these photos include the ones we don’t want to keep but never got round to deleting. It’s estimated that for every photo that is posted online, another 5 were taken to get the perfect picture.

So, let’s start deleting all those blurry and unflattering pics!

 

Desktops and Laptops

The same principle of course applies to the documents and other files on your computers.

Tools like Dropbox and OneDrive make it easy to share files with friends and colleagues – but those shared files are often forgotten about until we run out of space on those clouds.

So, let’s have a quick look through the shared folders and delete everything that’s no longer needed.

 

Emails

Long gone are the times where Email providers would have ridiculous restrictions on our email quota. Many now offer 50GB and more and that’s a lot of space!

However, the downside is that we often no longer do any housekeeping on our email accounts and keep old and no longer relevant emails for much longer than necessary.

So, let’s have a look at our emails – can we delete some or at least archive them to a portable drive? How about this Western Digital 2TB portable drive which includes password protection so your files are still safe.

But it’s not just the storage of old emails but the sending and receiving of them as well.

Unsubscribe from any marketing material you are not interested in and think about who really needs to be copied into an email.

 

And a final bit of advice…

Cleaning up the rubbish on our phones and computers is great, not just for the environment but for our soul as well. And if you are worried about deleting anything you may later need, just do a compressed local backup first.

Get in touch if you want any advice or prefer for us to get you all set up – an hour you will not regret investing in!!

Any other tips? Leave your comment below

 

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