# 5 tips for tackling digital decluttering the right way Press release of 23 November 2022: five tips on how organisations can save storage space, costs and CO2 with enterprise search and file sharing. *Vienna, 23 November 2022* Saving storage space with enterprise search and file-sharing solutions **(Vienna, 23 November 2022)** In 2005 Hitachi released the first 500 GB hard disk – an unimaginable size at the time. Since then our need for storage has grown enormously: emails, documents, photos, databases, websites – the mountain of data grows every day. For companies this means additional costs for storage – the space needed for the growing flood of data. On top of that come additional costs for administration and searching. The environment and the climate are also burdened more heavily by the increased volume of data. Greenhouse gas emissions caused by IT are rising by 8 % a year and, according to a study by the climate think tank The Shift Project, already account for 3 to 4 percent of total CO2 emissions. A good reason to think about digital decluttering. The following tips show how organisations can use enterprise search solutions and hands-on techniques for digital decluttering and so free up expensive storage. ## More space & more security ## Tip 1: Remove unused software Outdated software solutions that are no longer needed not only take up space on servers and client computers, they often pose a considerable security risk as well. For hackers, these unused and unpatched programs often offer a gateway through which they can gain access to other parts of a company's IT infrastructure. Why not use the quiet days between the holidays to take a look at the installed software? With the Windows tool “Add or remove programs” you can quickly see how much storage space each installed program uses and remove software you no longer need quickly and easily. ## Every little bit adds up ## Tip 2: Declutter email mailboxes Admittedly, not every email that has been read can simply be deleted – electronic correspondence is also subject to certain retention obligations. But let's be honest – how many of the countless newsletters that land in our mailboxes every day are actually read, rather than kept for an “I'll read it later” that keeps being pushed further into the future? An enterprise search solution can help to separate the wheat from the chaff and take on mailboxes that have grown far too large. Enterprise search solutions allow intelligent searching and filtering of records (emails, files, database entries, etc.) based on their content in all storage locations in the company. Such software also makes it possible to find and filter emails by a wide range of criteria. Subscriptions can thus be found and cancelled quickly, and mail can easily be decluttered. ## Tip 3: Avoid attachments – save storage space & CO2 Brochures, reports, quotations, contracts, photos – many documents not only live on file servers and PCs, but also bloat the mailboxes of senders and recipients. “One and the same document is often found in many copies on company servers, sometimes with different file names but the same content. Many of these duplicates were sent as attachments,” says Christoph Wendl, CEO of the Viennese IT company Iphos IT Solutions. “It is safer and more resource-efficient not to send frequently needed documents such as product photos and brochures as attachments at all, but to make them available via a link to a file-sharing cloud storage. The documents can then be viewed or downloaded by the recipient in a single version. For confidential documents you can additionally work with password-protected access,” Wendl continues. An email with a large attachment causes around 50g of CO2, whereas the CO2 footprint of a simple email with a link is only around 5g. Avoiding sending attachments directly – for example by using a file-sharing solution such as shareit based on Nextcloud – therefore not only saves storage space, it also helps to fight climate change. ## Tally-ho! Hunting duplicates on mail and file servers ## Tip 4: Find and clean up duplicate files A frequently lamented problem in organisations is the multiple versions of one and the same file, often scattered under different names across the various data sources and thus successfully resisting being thinned out. Top-level enterprise search solutions can help here. The enterprise search software searchit from the Austrian software manufacturer Iphos IT Solutions, for example, also offers a plugin for storage management in its current version that is dedicated to hunting down duplicates. A specially developed algorithm checks all documents connected to the search software for duplicates. The searchit algorithm calculates a so-called checksum for each document and stores it in the index. If a checksum occurs more than once after indexing, the documents are exact duplicates. Even if the copy of a document has been moved to another storage location, sent as an attachment or renamed, searchit can detect the duplicates across all connected data sources – whether on the file server, mail server, web server or on the PCs. “Finding duplicates was a frequent request from customers for extending our search solution searchit. Because this is where most organisations lose a lot of storage space. That costs money for purchasing additional infrastructure, but also for energy in the ongoing operation of the servers and storage solutions. In times of rising energy and hardware costs, that is not an insignificant factor,” says Wendl. ## Tip 5: Tackle the biggest problems first with a better overview As is well known, you first have to become aware of a problem in order to tackle it. Often, however, organisations are not at all clear about what has accumulated over time in their various data stores and how much data storage has to be spent on it. With its storage visualisation, the enterprise search software searchit also scores with a graphical display of the storage in use. Whether the share of duplicated documents is to be shown as a percentage or by the storage it requires – the “storage management” plugin enables a structured clean-up of data stores. Files that are no longer needed can optionally be deleted using a four-eyes principle. In that case every deletion request must be approved by an authorised user. Every day is a good day to start getting the data chaos under control with a leaner structure. The approaching turn of the year may provide a little extra motivation to actually tackle digital decluttering and start the new year with tidy data stores. More information on enterprise search with searchit: [www.searchit-enterprise-search.com](https://www.searchit-enterprise-search.com) More information on enterprise file sharing with shareit: [iphos.com/shareit](https://iphos.com/shareit) ## About searchit The international company Iphos IT Solutions is redefining “enterprise search engines” for businesses. With the launch of searchit, the company is positioning itself as a sustainable innovator in the industry. Ing. Christoph Wendl, together with Lyubomir Ivanov, runs the company, founded in 1998, as Chief Executive Officer (CEO); the company meets the current challenges of IT with innovative solutions. ## Media contact - Ing. Christoph Wendl, Managing Director, Iphos IT Solutions GmbH - Khekgasse 35, 1230 Vienna, Austria - Phone: +43 1 869 84 00 - Email: [info@searchit.cc](mailto:info@searchit.cc) - [Release as PDF (German)](https://searchit-agent.ai/pr/5-tipps-wie-sie-digitales-entruempeln-optimal-angehen/20221123-presseaussendung-digitales-entruempeln.pdf) --- - searchit AI Agent: This version is generated from the page's language files (scripts/gen-unternehmen.py). The page itself is authoritative.