The third Saturday of March each year marks Digital Cleanup Day, aimed at raising awareness about digital pollution, encouraging companies to declutter their online presence.
This year, we held our very first ADS/HSDS Digital Clean-up Day on Friday 20th March to reduce the digital waste in our computers (email accounts, Google Drive, local disks) and servers (including supercomputers and VMs).
Organised by Digital Archives Assistant Burcu Akşahin, the organisation took some time out from our usual tasks for a little spring cleaning. This allowed us to reduce our carbon footprint, free up storage, and maintain the smooth operation of our systems by deleting what no longer needed to exist.
Over the day we tracked all the data we deleted using a central spreadsheet covering all our different platforms. After sharing these numbers with the Digital Cleanup Day initiative they confirmed that we deleted 4.73 TB of clutter!
We’re planning for it to be an annual event every third Friday of March to align with the World Digital Cleanup Day.
