Working with a computer is normally very easy and most of our tasks are so mundane that we don’t often think about the size of the files that we are storing, but size does matter!

Take a minute and see whether these visuals help you to better understand the size of files you’re sending through email and storing on servers.

1 byte—any character on your keyboard
1 kilobyte—a joke or a couple of paragraphs
1 megabyte—a small novel
1 gigabyte—the bed of a pickup truck filled with printed paper
1 terabyte—about 50,000 trees made into paper and printed with information
1 petabyte—20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets full of text
1 exabyte—all data recorded by our species in 2003
1 zettabyte—(1.8) estimated amount of total electronic data in existence by 2011

If your network folder contains a gigabyte or more of files, you might want to think about going through that pickup truck full of printed paper and tossing some things (virtually) out. We forget that we’re not the only ones saving files to our servers. Picture the school parking lot instead of being filled with happy commuter vehicles now being filled completely with pickup trucks stuffed to the gills with paper. This is the information on our school servers. Do we really need to personally keep that much information on hand? Is it used on a regular basis? If these files were in your file cabinets, wouldn’t you have thrown some of them out by now to make room for something more current?

To know the size of a file, simply right-click on it, and go to Properties. On the General tab, you will see the size of the file itself, and when saved on any disk. You might want to experiment, looking at several of your files to see the size, and then look at what is in them. Is the same file saved as a .doc the same size when it’s saved as a .pdf? (Hint: This blog, saved as a .doc is 25.5 KB, while saved as a .pdf, it is 130 KB.)

One of the biggest space hogs is in photos and videos. Next week, I’ll tell you about IrfanView, the software application on your school computer that you can use to resize photos, making them more manageable for saving and printing.