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A lot of people both online and offline keep asking me how can they keep track and how can they cope with so much information they have to deal with in their lives, specially now in the computer and the internet world with virtually ENDLESS information and with more information coming everyday to their lives. To make things even harder, new technologies are developed everyday so it’s even harder to keep up with them all.

One thing I want you to notice is that this guide is valid only for this day! New tools and better systems and patches and upgrades and a lot of things come every second sometimes even faster. If you apply this guide and it does not work anymore tomorrow it’s because of upgrades and new released and new tools that make this guide obsolete. Obviously it’s not possible for me to keep up with this Title all the time so until a new article about this subject is published, just assume this is the best you can do right now.

Today information inside the computers have a lot of faces and those faces are in lots of places. Information can be in images, text files, word files, works files, pdf files and those very same files can be in the hard disk, in the internet, in a server, in the network, in your email, in your mobile phone sometimes and so it’s really hard to find anything in that sea of data.

You need help so I wrote this article.

Let’s first see the places you save information to:

1. The hard disk is the place with the most information for most peole because few are already aware of the concept ot clouding computing. I would say 99% of the people still use the hard disk as the primary storage device.
2. Email is the second in the list, no doubt. Most people get hundreds (yes, more than on hundred) emails per day with passwords, important numbers, reports, plans… the list is endless.
3. The browser history but most of all the bookmarks people use when they find a useful website.
4. Other websites such as messaging systems inside the forums.
5. DVD’s and pen drives and other portable devices.
6. Finally the mobile phone.

The ideal situation is having all that information in just one location and making it as useful, accessible and as fast as you can. I must warn you again about the timetable of the technologies. What is true today, can become a lie tomorrow with all the developments are released made everyday by the major players in the market in hardware and software. One example is the SSD drives. I wrote good articles about information storage and search before the SSD drive, they are obsolete now. This article is valid for today. Tomorrow it will be obsolete to.

The biggest problem you will face here is the information you need for specific applications such as Windows Movie maker as an example. These kind of files cannot live on the internet and be easily accessed by the desktop application. Because of this, this article is more focused on general applications and web workers because in the near future all applications will run online only.

Let’s start documents and other text files. You probably leave them inside the hard disk in a random folder and when you want to find it you hope for the best. It has become impossible to manage all the folders manually, it’s just impractical. To solve this problem you installed a desktop search application such as Google Desktop search or X1 Desktop or Windows Desktop. You were very happy until the day it takes more than ten seconds to find any file… This is a frequent problem with common hard disks. To solve this you can either upgrade your regular hard disk to a RAID 0 or you can get an SSD or SSD RAID which almost eight times faster. Still this is not fast enough nor cheap enough to make the necessary upgrades over time. What is the perfect solution (today!)? Using a fast and powerful email system with pop3 access and easy forwarding filters. You do not need to have all the documents with you everywhere all the time, if you leave them in Gmail for example (or hotmail or yahoo, but you need to pay for pop3 access) you can search them as fast as in one second no matter how many files you have there, plus you can download them all immediately with Thunderbird or browser. After editing them, just send another message to you with the updated document. If you find this not practical you can always use Zoho or Google Docs, but you will not have access to them with just one search box. Again measure advantages and disadvantages and make a final decision. I must leave this for you because to make this decision only you know what your real necessities are.

Image via Wikipedia

If you send all your documents to email (by email I always mean Gmail) you can automatically send a copy to Hotmail (with Hotmail add account new feature) and a copy to Yahoo (with the forward copy Gmail feature) and this way your mail is safe in three different locations with no additional costs or any additional user intervention. Furthermore you can mass download all the information with Thunderbird. To send all your documents to the email you will need to get Thunderbird to make things faster, then just send as much as twenty files at the same time to the email. Gmail will open them online like if they were a message. Now in Gmail you can search all your mail as fast as a desktop application thanks to Google servers power.

As you browse the internet you will find many pages you want to save to come back later. How can you do it? There are two ways most people use. One is to save page with the CTRL+S and save it to a folder in the hard drive. This system however is prone to be deleted by the user and it also makes the computer slower after one thousand downloads and desktop search tools are not fast enough to deal with that. Leaving a bookmark in Firefox is good but you will have to use an additional search box, plus you need to take your browser everywhere with you if you want to search it from other computer. Oh and not to mention you won’t be able to save full pages with the articles you love so much. The solution here is to use a Firefox extension called send to email. This will send the entire page you are in right now directly to your email using Thunderbird. This way the page is instantly searchable with Google mail search power.

Image via Wikipedia

All other pieces of information you have such as forums messages you need to copy and paste the to email messages and send them to you. There is no need or use to keep them in that place any longer.

DVD’s and other portable devices have documents, music, videos, random files and so on. How can you send them all to the email? The big files you can use Winzip (wasn’t but now it’s the best zipping tool) and break them into pieces with 10 MB each and send them all as a message using Thunderbird again. Do this just for videos, because for music and images you can leave them uncompressed and then just enjoy watching them and listening to them in the email.

The mobile phone is getting more and more importance in the world but still not as important as the laptop and in my opinion it will never be as important as the laptop. Lack of compatibility, software, power makes it so. What solution is to send all the information you have in the mobile phone directly to your desktop and then the email. If you want to call people you have Skype you know. For those who want to be low tech, it’s their problem.

As you can see, email shines in information management, usability, search ability, storage, sharing and more. Now everyone has email, everyone can get your messages so sending a music, document, video or anything is as easy as 1-2-3 plus you can send it to any computer with pop3 and Thunderbird. Your email is also safe in Yahoo, Hotmail (or any other inbox you want to add) so security is not a concern anymore. The cost is zero forever. What are the limitations?

I would say search.

I would say email sending abilities.

I would say storage (for Gmail only, the other ones have unlimited space).

I would say browsing abilities

Image via Wikipedia

Thunderbird is not the finest thing in the world to send all the files you make everyday to your email. Sending them all almost one by one is very painful, and if you mass zip them you lose the search abilities (or at the the contents search). You need some daily patience to send the information to the email to to classify it, but the rewards of doing so will be great!

Using email as a storage and information management device requires some advances skills. You need to know how to tag and classify information to find it later plus you need to know exactly what you are looking for before you attempt to browse more than fifty thousand messages (which is currently the number of messages I have in  Gmail archive.

One problem left, what about messages you have only inside Hotmail (or any other non pop3 account) and you want to send them to Gmail? Unfortunately you need to send them one by one. One of my friends randomly made possible to access Hotmail via Incredimail. He does not know how, nor I have tried yet. You can try it, then use Thunderbird to finish the job.

Some quick advantages of email versus desktop:

1. Security. Google takes care of at with the best AES encryption algorithms.
2. Speed. You will be “at mercy” of Google’s power.
3. Search speed because of the reason above.
4. Compatibility, email goes everywhere fits anything, even old mobiles.
5. Sharing ability, just send a message to anyone.
6. Browsing ability (with desktop applications such as Google Desktop)

One last thing now. You can use Google desktop to find it a little faster and sometimes better than Gmail search inbox.