# Digital decluttering made easy: 5 tips for the best strategies Press release of 21 December 2023: five tips on how companies can use enterprise search and file sharing to free up storage, find duplicates and save CO2. *Vienna, 21 December 2023* How enterprise search and file-sharing solutions help companies manage storage more efficiently **(Vienna, 21 December 2023)** In 2005, Hitachi released the first 500 GB hard disk – a size unimaginable at the time. Since then, our need for storage has grown enormously: emails, documents, photos, databases, websites – the mountain of data grows larger every day. For companies, this means additional costs for storage – the space for the growing flood of data. On top of that come additional costs for administration and search effort. 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 around 8 % a year and, according to a study by the climate think tank The Shift Project, already account for 3 to 4 per cent 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 ## More space & more security – Tip 1: Remove unused software Outdated software solutions that are no longer needed not only take up space on servers and client computers, they often also pose a considerable security risk. These unused and mostly unpatched programs offer hackers a welcome gateway through which they can gain access to further areas of a company’s IT infrastructure. Why not use the quiet days between the holidays to take a look at the software installed on your devices? 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 – after all, electronic correspondence is also subject to certain retention obligations. But hand on heart – how many of the countless newsletters that flutter into mailboxes every day are actually read, rather than just kept for an “I’ll read it later” that keeps being postponed further into the future? To separate the wheat from the chaff and to tackle mailboxes that are far too large, an enterprise search solution can help. Enterprise search solutions allow records (emails, files, database entries, etc.) to be searched and filtered intelligently by their content in all storage sources in the company. Software of this kind also makes it possible to find and filter emails by a wide range of criteria. Subscriptions can thus be found and cancelled quickly, and mailboxes easily decluttered. ## Tip 3: Avoid attachments – save storage space & CO2 Brochures, reports, quotes, 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 multiple 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 product brochures as attachments at all, but to make them available via a link to a file-sharing cloud storage. The documents can then be read or downloaded by the recipient without burdening mail servers in countless copies. For confidential documents, password-protected access can also be used,” Wendl continues. After all, an email with a large attachment causes around 50 g of CO2, while the CO2 footprint of a simple email with a link is only around 5 g. If you avoid sending attachments directly – for example by using a file-sharing solution such as shareit based on Nextcloud – you not only save storage space, you also do something about 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 reduced. 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 storage management plugin 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, these are exact duplicates of a document. Even if the copy of a document has been moved to another 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 we received for extending our search solution searchit. Because this is where a lot of storage space is lost in most organisations. That costs money for purchasing additional infrastructure, but also for the energy costs of running 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 before you can 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 representation of the storage in use. Whether the distribution of duplicated documents is to be shown as a percentage or by the storage they require – the “storage management” plugin enables data stores to be cleaned up in a structured way. Files that are no longer needed can optionally be deleted using a four-eyes principle. In this case, every deletion request must be approved by an authorised user. Every day is a good day to start getting data chaos under control with a leaner structure. The upcoming 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 about enterprise search with searchit: [www.searchit-enterprise-search.com](https://www.searchit-enterprise-search.com) More about 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); it 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/digital-entruempeln-leicht-gemacht-5-tipps-fuer-die-besten-strategien/20231120-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.