Rubenerd: The home storage crisis, via Doc Searls

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2021-07-04 16:00:09

The best new phones come with the ability to shoot 108 megapixel photos, record 4K video with stereo sound, and pack the results into a terabyte of onboard storage. But what do you do when that storage fills up?

If you want to keep those files, you’ll need to offload them somewhere. Since your computer probably doesn’t have more than 2Tb of storage, you’ll need an external drive. Or two. Or three. Or more. Over time, a lot more.

His solution was to keep his local drives, and back them up to the cloud. That works if you have a fat pipe, and are willing to trade immediate access for convenience, and the knowledge that a team of storage experts are maintaining that remote copy. The former rules out most of Australia.

Use what I dubbed a Stonehenge of External Drives back in 2009. Iomega had that excellent drive catalogue software in the 1990s that let you look up which Zip, Jaz, or Ditto cart had a file you were after; I wonder if there’s something similar now?

Take the eggs-in-one-basket approach and buy one very large external drive. Maybe you could use another drive as a duplicate that you keep off-site, assuming you remember to do this regularly.