Following World Digital Cleanup Day, the University is launching a Digital Spring Cleaning Challenge to help reduce Pitt’s carbon footprint by eliminating unneeded stale data.
Globally, unneeded files are estimated to generate 5.8 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions each year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of 1.2 million cars.
The good news is that cleaning up is easy and the benefits are immediate. Eliminating old files frees up storage space for faster performance, makes finding your files easier, and reduces Pitt’s carbon footprint. Small, collective actions can have a big impact on helping the University manage its resources sustainably.
A small number of files is often responsible for a large chunk of your storage use. A great first step in digital spring cleaning is finding and deleting those large files in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint that you no longer need.
Online Guides from Pitt Digital
- Find and delete unneeded data in OneDrive
- Find and delete unneeded data in SharePoint
- Find and delete unneeded data from Pitt Email
Watch for more digital spring cleaning tips over the next few months to help keep the momentum going. Together, we can lower our environmental impact and make our digital lives a little easier to navigate.
More Resources
- 3 Tips to Clean Up Your Cloud Storage (Pitt Digital)
- Clean Up Your Computer and Google Drive (Digital Cleanup Day)
- Clean Up Your Smartphone and Tablet (Digital Cleanup Day)