I am not sure where all the things in my life come from, somehow I manage to accumulate additional suitcases filled with more stuff than I use, but which I also have a hard time letting go of. I tell myself that I am frugal. But this doesn’t really work in my favour.

This tendency to hold onto.. isn’t this really a form of hoarding? Even if I still have space to breathe and my hoarding doesn’t quite manifest in the true crazy person hoarding, I still feel that I have a problem letting go of things.

If belongings stop me from being free to follow opportunities or new ideas then surely I do actually have a real problem. So what’s going on? Why this fear of letting go? I always come up with great reasons why I need to hold onto this and that, and often the reasons are really solid, make great sense and are difficult to argue against.

However, in my heart I know that no matter how good the reason for holding on, the reason for letting go is better, letting go allows something to happen in my life that fear of letting go doesn’t.

All this wisdom is of little use unless I implement it, too. I’ll ponder on what is holding me back another time but next up is the issue of digital stuff.

My digital life is about as bloated, if not more so, than the life of my physical possessions. I seem to forever struggle to clear my laptop hard drive. Today I again had a warning from my mac that its storage is almost full. Oh, no, not again. I actually ran out of storage space on my external hard drives, too.

I will once more give in, purchase a couple of new hard drives. I always buy 2 external hard drives to be able to set up a mirrored backup system, I can explain why I do this and why you should, too, another time. Keeping onto digital files and storing them on external hard drives isn’t so bad, but now that digital files are larger and larger it is becoming an expensive habit. I estimate that I will need about 12TB storage space a year total from now on (double that for the mirrored backing up system). That sounds like a crazy amount! But I deal with a lot of images and video files and as I mentioned above I have a serious problem with letting go of things. So I hold onto most digital files, when really I should make it a regular habit to delete what is of no use to me.

It made more sense 10 years ago to hold onto each photo, I took fewer and my memories were more remarkable than they currently are. Or maybe that, too, is just a perception.

I like 4TB Western Digital for hard drives, they seem like a decent price point and a reliable brand. That doesn’t mean they are never going to fail, all hard drives may one day fail (or may not). Actually this brings me back once more to why I use a mirrored backing up system.. Ok I’ll leave this standing as is, but here is the hard drive that I will buy. I am planning on getting 2x 4TB red hard drives this time, as I already have 2 identical black Western Digital hard drives . I recommend these drives to all of my friends. I used to use the rugged Lacie drives, but in America they seem much more expensive than they were back in the UK, which is why I now use Western Digital (WD).

You can also just click on the picture of the hard drive that you would like and it will take you straight to Amazon, sometimes the red drive is a little bit more expensive than the black, which for me is worth it because I have multiple drives that are identical and it makes it easier for me to be able to just grab the right one in a rush, without even needing to read a label. If you want to save about $10 then you can click on the black drive and usually those are cheaper. For hard drive labelling I just use masking tape or anything else that is sticky and can be written onto with a permanent marker.

If you use the link to the hard drive that I am getting and purchase one for yourself, then I should let you know that this link is an affiliate link. It will NOT cost you anything extra to use the link, yet I gain a small percentage reward for bringing you to Amazon today. There is no catch and the recommendation is genuine: I use WD drives and am feeling confident that they are a good product.