The Terabyte Problem

I recently came across an online ad of an online retailer- Forget GB, welcome to TB; objective was very simple: push the sales for the external 1TB hard disk into high gear. Does it work- well if I cite personal examples, they do. I have one for the last 3 months, but to this day I have not stored a single file on it. The main reason is that I have another one of 320GB and even that is not utilized to the full.

I am at a loss to understand how I ended up this way. I upgraded my desktop (I still have one) to 500GB, have a laptop with the same, my father has two laptops with 320GB and 50GB at hand. What is now lacking is content to fill up all this space. My desktop is my active backup for all my media and has a mirror on the external. This also included taking data off DVDs which I burnt when I college.

Even then, at present I am facing a very peculiar problem which I never have faced before- a problem of plenty.

I take pride in the fact that I am amongst the generation which welcomed computers into Indian homes. Honestly, this also gave us a chance to be witness to changing data storage devices. My friend from childhood across the road had a Sinclair machine with a tape drive. We actually had to insert game on magnetic tapes to play. The somewhere in 1994, my brother got home a 5 1/4” floppy from his computer class which was like a prized possession. A year later we had a 286 at home and 3 1/2” floppies made their debut and I can say we lasted on 1.44MB data limitation till 2004. Sure the CDR and CDRW had arrived but USB pen drive was like a paradigm shift in portable data.

While in MBA, the minnows had 128 or 256MB pen drives and at that time, the Data Lord was my roomie with a 500GB HDD in 2006-07. But most of these Data Lords I have seen,  have a disorder of a compulsive type- they cannot survive without downloading; mostly movies. For them, pride runs in the fact that I have an unlimited high speed internet and movies and music spread across 3 to 4 external drives of terabyte capacities. What is a disaster though is most of these guys have no idea of what all they have and where. Worse is they have not even seen half of the stuff they have downloaded (my roomie was an exception here)- a colossal waste in my view of time and space resource.

One thing I have realized is that a lot of data space was lost in duplication of content. With me, the same movies existed in three different folders- Downloads, English and New Movies and as a backup also on some DVD which I had now completely lost track of. The same was also true for music; same songs under genres, artists and parts of folders that were exchanged between friends and family. My mission to clear out duplication resulted in deletion of unwanted archaic data as well as leaving me with load of space.

So bottom line- how much is enough? I really don’t know. But what I am sure of is that there is no use filling up terabyte space with movies, music and other stuff unless you go back to it time and again. Coz honestly most of it is not so rare and so unique that you will not find it again someday.