How many terabytes for you?

Mar 19, 2007

I had a motherboard go out on me this weekend. It didn’t take me entirely by surprise, so I had already done some serious backup of my files. However, there are always those little files you didn’t know you needed … so last night and this morning I was pulling miscellaneous files out of my two resurrected hard drives, slipped into little cases and hooked up to a spare machine on a temporary basis. I put all of these files, and all my backups at the moment, onto a nice Seagate USB 2.0 150 GB external hard drive. The drive is over a year old – at the time, I was thrilled with 150 GB.

500gb Today, I was doing a little online browsing, and was seriously considering investing in a 500 GB Fantom external drive. Why do I need 500 GB? Honestly, I’m just thinking ahead. I use, and create, a lot more video and audio than I previously did.

As our world continues to evolve digitally, our files and so much of our daily activities, are not going to be paper based. Everything is moving to digital. We need a place to keep it all. For instance, I haven’t had photos printed in several years. I originally kept our photos in scrapbooks. Those took up too much space and too much time. So I moved to scrap boxes. From there, I started publishing the files manually to our personal family web space. In the last two years, I’ve moved to Flickr, which is even easier. In a way, I consider Flickr my photo backup location, and all the original digital files are on a single machine at home. A Macintosh devoted entirely to digital photos. We’ve also boxed up our CD collection and put it in storage. All of our music is now digital. We lost that drive a while back and learned the value of backing up data then. All of my wedding video is digital. All of these things in my life that are personal, not work related, are digital. 500 GB is not out of the question.

Tb_hd
Then I came across this. It’s a 1 terabyte external hard drive.1 TB is 1,024 GB. I didn’t know you could buy these yet. I remember in 1999 when I was excited that my tangerine iBook had a 10 GB hard drive. Now I’m contemplating 1000 GB?! But taking into account how digital our lives are now, is a 1 TB hard drive really that far of a stretch?