IT Tips & Tricks
5½ Ways to Handle Data Hoarding Employees
Published 15 December 2025
Why do employees refuse to let go of old files? Is data hoarding a security risk? How does data-bloat impact migration costs? What can you do about the data packrats embedded in your organization?
If you’re an IT manager or CIO grappling with overflowing servers, you likely ponder questions like these regularly. Understanding the “why” behind digital hoarding is the first step toward reducing storage costs, minimizing legal liability and ensuring a smooth data migration.
Digital hoarding is like an employee’s evidence locker.
This article explores the root causes of file accumulation and offers actionable strategies to declutter your organization’s digital footprint.
The “Just in Case” Syndrome
Walk into any physical office and you might see a clean desk. But open that same employee’s network drive and you are often met with a chaotic, sprawling mess of folders titled “Old,” “Old_Old,” and “Do Not Delete.”
In the digital realm, storage feels infinite. When the drive is full, IT just adds another terabyte, right?
Often, digital hoarding isn’t about laziness. It’s more like an employee’s evidence locker. Many employees view their data as evidence of work. Deleting a file feels like erasing the effort it took to create it. There is also the fear of the “What If?” scenario:
- What if the client specifically asks for that 2014 draft?
- What if the new version crashes and I need the backup?
- What if I need to prove I sent this email five years ago?
In the physical world, space constraints force us to purge. Our filing cabinets get full. Our desks get cluttered. But in the digital realm, storage feels infinite. When the drive is full, IT just adds another terabyte, right? This lack of physical friction enables the hoarding instinct to run wild, resulting in a culture where “Keep Everything!” becomes the default policy.
The Hidden Costs of Data Bloat
While storage hardware has become cheaper, the cost of managing that storage has skyrocketed. Data bloat is not a victimless crime — it’s a silent budget killer.
- The “Needle in a Haystack” Productivity Tax: When a server is clogged with 15 versions of the same contract, finding the correct one takes longer. Employees waste hours every week simply navigating folder trees or opening the wrong files. This friction slows down workflows and increases the risk of working with outdated data.
Everything is slower when your data is hoarded, nested, bloated…
- The Migration Nightmare: This is where the pain becomes acute. If you are planning a migration — whether to the cloud (such as to SharePoint) or a new server infrastructure — every gigabyte counts.
- Time: Moving 10TB of data takes significantly longer than moving 4TB of sleek, clean data.
- Cost: Cloud storage often incurs ingress/egress fees and monthly per-GB costs. Migrating “junk” data means you are paying rent on garbage every single month.
- Link Integrity: All else being equal, the more files you move, the more file links are broken, resulting in data loss and productivity slows. In other words, more money circling the drain. (Note: There is a way to protect your file links.)
A lean file system is a fast file system.
- The Compliance and Legal Time Bomb: In the event of a lawsuit or audit, “Discovery” requires you to produce all relevant documents. If you’ve hoarded every email and draft since 2010, you must sift through all of it.
- Liability: You cannot get in trouble for a document you don’t have (assuming it was deleted according to the timing and conditions stipulated in legal company policy). But if you keep a 10-year-old draft containing sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) that should have been purged, you may be liable for it during a breach.
The Strategic Value of the “Digital Purge”
Cleaning up data is often viewed as a chore, but it should be framed as a strategic advantage. A lean file system is a fast file system.
- Faster Disaster Recovery (DR): In a ransomware attack or server failure, your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is dictated, in major part, by how much data you need to restore. Restoring a lean, critical dataset is hours faster than restoring a bloated one, meaning your business gets back online sooner.
- Optimized Search and AI Readiness: As organizations start using internal AI tools (like Microsoft Copilot) to search their data, quality matters. If your AI is training on obsolete data, it will give you obsolete answers. Clean, current data ensures accurate insights.
- Employee Clarity: A clean directory structure reduces mental load. Employees feel less stressed when they can instantly locate the “final” version of a document without second-guessing themselves or endlessly digging through decades of nested documents.
How to Cure the Hoarding: 5½ Actionable Tips
You cannot solve a hoarding problem with technology alone. You need to change the culture. Here are some tips to encourage employees to let go.
1. Implement “Active Archiving” instead of Deletion:
The word “delete” triggers nervousness. The word “archive” triggers safety. Create a “ReadOnly_Archive” folder structure. Tell employees: “We aren’t deleting your old files. We’re moving them to a read-only vault. You can still find them if you absolutely need to, but they won’t clutter your daily workspace.” Set up this archive in its own low-priority storage medium, separate from your main storage where you keep your active files. Ideally, make it so you’ll likely never even need to migrate this data anywhere.
- Why it works: It removes the fear of loss while clearing the active workspace.
Storing junk is an exercise in futility (and wasteful spending).
2. The “3-Year Rule” Audit:
Run a report on your file server to identify files that haven’t been accessed in over three years. Present this data to department heads.
- The Pitch: “Marketing, you have 2TB of video footage from 2021 that no one has touched in four years. Can we move this to cold storage?”
- The Result: Most departments will agree to archive it once they realize they aren’t using it.
Bonus Idea (no extra charge): Even better, automate the entire process so that anything that hasn’t been opened in three years (or whatever number of years works for your organization) is automatically moved to your archive storage. Then wait to see if someone complains. If someone yaps, only then does a human need to get involved and, even then, just long enough to have the particular file or folder moved back to where it’s needed.
3. Standardize Version Control:
Stop the file naming madness (Project_v1, Project_v2, Project_Final_Real). Either formulate a company policy on standardized naming conventions or encourage the use of version history features built into modern platforms like SharePoint or specialized document management systems.
- Additional Idea: If you must use file servers, enforce a policy where only the current version lives in the root folder and old versions go into the “ReadOnly_Archive” or an “Old_Versions” subfolder.
4. Define a Clear Retention Policy:
Employees hoard because they don’t know the rules. If management doesn’t say “Delete invoices after seven years,” employees will hang onto them forever “just to be safe.”
- Action: Publish a simple, one-page cheat sheet on how long to keep common document types (Contracts, HR records, Financials). Make it visual and easy to read.
Is your data a couch potato or a lean, agile athlete?
5. Clean Before You Migrate:
Never “lift and shift” a mess. Treat a migration the same as a moving day for a house. If you wouldn’t pack the previous owner’s attic trash and move it into your new home, don’t do it with your data.
- The Process: Audit your links and file usage before the move. Identify the ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) data and purge it. This ensures your new environment starts fresh and your migration completes faster.
5½. Bribery:
If none of the above have had the desired effect, it may be time to resort to tried and tested techniques such as bribery (only it would probably be better to refer to it as an “incentive”).
- The Action: Announce an in-house competition with something like the following as said “incentive”:
- The first twenty employees to handle their extraneous files win a gift card.
- The first division to de-bloat their data gets lunch on the house.
- The first division to fully handle their data hoard wins a half-day off on Friday. (And the divisional head gets a bonus for making it happen!)
Never underestimate the power of a decent bribe incentive.
- The Result: Get creative with those bribes — and watch as everyone scrambles to be a winner.
The Last Word
Data hoarding is a natural human instinct adapted to a digital world, but it is an instinct that businesses can no longer afford to indulge. The “Keep Everything” mentality slows down innovation, bloats budgets and complicates migrations.
By understanding the “why” behind the behavior — the fear of loss and the need for evidence — IT leaders can implement more effective strategies, like active archiving and clear retention policies. The goal isn’t just to delete files willy-nilly. It’s to uncover and retain the valuable information hidden beneath the clutter.
By Ed Clark
Ed Clark
LinkTek COO
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