Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Happy Thursday everyone I wanted to pop in real quick with your yearly reminders. As we get caught up in the end of the year festivities and enjoying family, friends, gifts, food and decorations we often forget about all of the digital goodies we’ve stocked up on all year long. All of the beautiful pages we created sitting on our hard drives. The unzipped files in our downloads that we haven’t went back to and the unused kits we haven’t gotten a chance to scrap with yet.

 

That’s ok. We don’t have to stress about it, but we should do some end of the year maintenance and backups to make sure everything is in order so we’re ready to go fresh for the new year! Are you still with me?! lol, good! Some of the things I do to get my files ready for the new beginnings of each year are super quick and can easily be done in a weekend. So I wanted to come share them with you.

 

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been” -Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Here’s a few Sweet Tips I try to complete at the end of each year:

 

• File it all. I’m normally the “unzip & file” as soon as I purchase digital goodies type-A personality, but during big sales like Black Friday I might have a stash waiting. So I always make sure I’ve gotten everything from downloads unzipped and filed before the end of the year.
• Checking the list twice. At the end of the year I go through each store’s designer list and make sure it matches the ones I have in my folder for that store. I just head to the Shoppe area and use the designer list to check off who I have or don’t. Sometimes I forget to move a retiring designer out of the folder during the year or one that has moved shops.

• Purge or not to Purge? Never one to be against a good purging whether I think we have “unlimited” digital/cloud saving space or not. EHDs, cloud storage, hard drives, all of that costs money and I don’t like to spend it if I don’t have to. I’ve never been one to shy away from purging physical items and the same goes for digital ones too. If products no longer fit my needs or style I’ve been known to delete them from my files. I often do this at the end of the year. I will go through each store folder, each designer folder and view each product I have from them. Carefully determining my needs for scrapping, my style, if I’ve used the product previously, if the product was a “freebie” or CT product or purchased, and how I feel overall about the design “look” and “feel” of the product before I make my purging decision. Usually I will move all potential purge contenders into a folder of their own and come back after a week or so and do the same review of them again before the final “push” of that delete button. Sometimes there will be some I can’t let go of, for various reasons, usually sentimental.

 

 

• A new year to document. I organize my photos by year first. Then by date of event, moment etc. So, at the end of the year I go ahead and create my new yearly album ready for the upcoming moments and memories it will hold. Hello 2024! Something about the empty folder there waiting for all of the photos it will hold just gives me good vibes. I like seeing it there, as if saying: “I’m ready for the memories”.
• Finally….back up everything. With a husband that has a network admin profession I’ve got auto backups on my PC that run weekly during the wee hours of the night, so this one I don’t have to think about. I’ll admit it here, this is actually pretty nice. But if you don’t have that, this is your reminder, do your backups this month. lol.

 

Hope these tips are helpful to you. before you go, don’t forget that our Advent Calendar is live for December. Do you have any tips you do at the end of the year with your digital files? If so, share them for us all in the comments.