How Big Is My Digital Life?
As yet another Terra-byte hard-disk is full here at home, I was wondering where this is going. And after looking trough all my files and information I have it is interesting to think how I will deal with all these digital stuff 20 years from now.
First of all, I divide everything digital in two things; original content and collected content. For me the most important part of my digital life is the original content. These are photos that I’ve made or my friends or family. Documents I made for my businesses, being accounting excel sheets or business propositions. Blogs I wrote on my personal websites. My email conversations with 1000′s of people. Everything that is created and unique to and for me.
Collected content is an whole different story; it’s interesting to have some movies on my harddisk and gigabytes of MP3′s. To have shared a Youtube video or an interesting tweet or Google Reader item. To like an item or to favorite a website. It’s all not original content. It’s just a pointer to what I find interesting. And while it’s interesting to have this information, it’s not crucial. If I loose my harddisk (and the mirrored harddisk and the synchronisation of all my documents to Google Documents) I would be sad to loose my films or music, but it would be devastating to loose my photo’s or documents.
So, focus back to original content. While there are a lot of different categories, I will take a few clear ones to make my point.
Photos
I’ve got a total of 36 gigabytes of original content photos. 19.695 photos in total. I started with digital photography in 2002 when the megapixels where still around 3 megapixels and the photo sizes small. Today I’m shooting with 8 megapixels and every picture is much bigger in size.
In 2009 alone I already shot 5,4 gigabytes /2.943 of photos. So when you think about it. In 20 years time I’ll add at least 100 gigabytes and 60.000 photos to my collection. And this is just a small number, taken the fact that resolutions will get higher and cameras will be much more present then now in my life.
Videos
This is even worse then photos. Video’s are already much bigger then a photo and then you have the nice HD revolution, making the video’s even bigger. I already have 700 megabytes here at on my disk from mini-dv copies and video’s shot with my photocamera.
Documents & The Rest
And so the story continues. More email, more documents. With 61,415 emails and mailing since ’91, but really mailing a lot since 2000. I’ve got around 6000 emails last year in my archive. 6000 emails per year over 20 years: makes a total of 180.000 emails.
Conclusion
I see 3 problems that need to be solved to handle this:
- Storage
- Organizing
- Search
All three problems are being worked on by different companies. So I’ve faith that it will all be solved before it really gets crazy. It would be nice that the day came that I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about backups, where to store content so that I can find it again easily and that I just could type in a seach box:
“Video of Rody and Indy horseback riding at the beach in Australia”
