Best tech to declutter your life – Top 10

7. Online storage

Why shell out for portable hard disks or other storage media, when you can use an online storage service to back up and synchronise your files across multiple PCs. Whether it’s save game files or that vital work presentation, services such as Sugarsync – which is available in both free and paid-for versions – instantly take the hassle out of moving files from one place to another. Best of all you won’t have piles of backup DVDs or messy external drives snaking from your PC.

We use Sugarsync to avoid having to own or carry portable hard disks

6. Rip your discs

Like bibliophiles and their libraries, music fans tend to accumulate massive stacks of CDs. You’ve probably already ripped your favourites to listen to on MP3 so you can listen to them on the move, but we like to make sure we have a full-quality lossness copy saved, which we can then use to create smaller, lower-quality versions.

Our favourite software for ripping is Foobar2000 in combination with the lossless FLAC codec and the LAME codec to turn our files into more popularly supported MP3s.

Unfortunately, you can’t legally keep your ripped tracks if you get rid of the CD, but there’s nothing to stop you from keeping the original discs in the attic from now on, and you’ll probably find more than a few that you really don’t want to listen to again. Read on for our tips on how to get rid of them.

Ripping your CDs to lossless audio means you can retain all their audio quality when you tuck them away into storage

5. Go digital

Now you’ve got all your CDs out of sight, you can avoid having to go through the hassle of ripping new music by buying digital versions. However, it’s worth shopping carefully. You can buy DRM-free MP3 tracks from Amazon, but you can’t re-download them after the initial download window’s closed, so you’ll have to make sure you back them up using Sugarsync or a similar service.

Other online music stores include indie-friendly Bandcamp, which provides a wider range of formats than most, CDBaby and Spotify, which is better known for its streaming music service. A Spotify subscription is a great alternative option if you’d rather listen to a wide variety of music than have your own copies of the tracks.

Digital versions aren’t limited to music. You can buy digital copies of audiobooks from Audible and stream rented movies and TV from Netflix.