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1 TibiByte Wet Dream - Part 1
The Problem
I've been busy composing a new PC for myself.
The problem I always encounter is storage. One always needs more! I remember how happy I was with my 286 with 20MB of storage! How incredibly spacey the ensuing 486SX was with a whopping 250MB harddisk! And now? I've got 160GB crammed with stuff, a box full of DVD's containing all kinds of things and the end is not even near. So I was thinking to myself and I think I'll spend my hard-earned cash on something else.
Local versus Online
Storing anything locally is actually a bad idea because of the major issues with continuity and especially reliability.
A virus breaks out, wiping half of your harddisk: data gone.
Your hard disk crashes: data gone.
CD's en DVD's rot: data gone.
Filesystem breaks down: data gone.
The local computer"expert" decides your PC needs a thorough makeover and doesn't back up your only partition: data gone (and the stupid look on the guys face when he says:"o, I didn't it had to be saved").
And don't think it won't happen to your stuff, everybody is at huge risk. With all the recent developments in the hard disk and optical storage worlds it is increasingly difficult to tell how stable a storage device is over the course of a couple of years. Remember one the principal selling arguments for the CD was that it had no wear and tear. By now we know so much better.
In short: Everything that's stored locally is under a constant threat of being lost. And so I'm a so-called Service-Oriented Architecture evangelist. Store as much as possible to trusted third parties. Consider how much you could permanently save already by moving it to someplace on the internet?
- E-mails: The dark days of the 2.5MB web-mail storage are gone forever thanks to the introduction of Google's GMail. The counter, last I checked, is now running at 2,613MB, more than I'll probably mail for the rest of my life.
There are other possibilities like GMX, but the overall package and the completely new and innovative interface make GMail the clear winner this round. If someone wants an invite, just drop me a line! - Documents, letters, correspondence, presentations, e-books etcetera: GMail will serve you well here as well thanks to its innovative interface. Using the tagging & labels options in a smart way makes storing and filing these kinds of (usually) small things a breeze, saving them forever, clear and with extensive search capabilities.
- URLs, favourites and stuff: GMail's labeling & tagging systems would allow you to do this as well, although it would require you to send an e-mail to yourself every time you do it, making the process somewhat inhibitive. I've recently started using del.icio.us, a website which, like others, made "social bookmarking" a big thing. It offers a tag-system for sharing links with others. The tagging system takes a little while getting used to, but after that you wouldn't want otherwise. Adding links to your account isn't more difficult than adding a bookmark to your browser.
- Adresses: It starts sounding old, but again: GMail. Admittedly the functionality offered is kinda basic, but very usable and searchable. If not see below.
- Agenda/Appointments etc.: There are a plethora of solutions for this. Since I don't need it, I'll have to look into it later on. However, a quick "organiser online" in Google yields more than enough hits. Downside to this is that there are dozens of applications, most notably the crap they deliver with cell phones, which can't handle anything else than Outlook-garbage, or, with a little luck, Lotus.
Remains only the larger stored stuff, like photographs, movies, music, projects and the like, and other miscellaneous stuff that can't be stored online like chatlogs.
Although there are a multitude of solutions for photographs to be stored online I consider none of these a serious option because they always carry too low a limit and/or compression factor, inexcusably downsampling the image. Aside from that a number of things can have continuity- and trust-issues.
So, to get around these things the only way at this point is to store locally anyway.
However, I think it's safe to conclude that we have to do that redundant and fail-safe, because the aforementioned scenarios are nightmares you wish upon nobody and which have happened all TOO often in my experience.
Birth of an Idea
One evening a couple of friends and I were joking about how relaxxed it would be to store your entire digital life on a single system. When fire breaks out you'd only have to get one single box and carry it out to save EVERYTHING you hold valuable from certain fiery doom.
Although the idea made for a couple of good jokes and caused quite some hilarity, it's actually quite serious. Whenever you need to evacuate your house for whatever reason within 5 minutes just about anything you hold dear remains behind. Especially photo-albums and other personal collections are always tragic losses, both in terms of personal attachment as, more pragmatically, invested time. Projects and hobby's which currently are spread out across your computer system(s) are also lost beyond rescue.
All things considered I think you owe it to yourself to take care of this data, and apparently a single hard disk won't do for that.
