The Trouble with Terabytes

by John C. Dvorak

I filled a terabyte drive with crap; now I need another terabyte drive. That means within the last few years I've accumulated 3 to 4 terabytes of data, much of it redundant from sloppy backup procedures and paranoia.

About a year ago one of my 500GB USB drives blew up, so now I'm backing up everything on both a second drive and DVDs. I've moved to dual-layer DVD+R disks: 8GB, which isn't enough for anything. I need 30GB Blu-ray or something bigger.

One of the problems everyone has is that since hard disks began to double in capacity every 12 months, we've become complacent with the knowledge that we'll never fill them up. But multimedia files and other downloads chew up space quickly, especially since everyone has gotten on the high-quality bandwagon. Downloading a movie? It has to be HD. Downloading an MP3? It has to be at a high bit rate.

My downloaded movies consist mostly of files off the Comcast DVR where I keep recording old classics from TCM. They build up, so I burn them on the DVD recorder before transferring them to a hard disk using HandBrake, the excellent video ripper. Then I watch the movies on a laptop when I travel. Of course I never watch anything, and they start to accumulate. 

On top of this useless collection of crap are my digital photos. I've upgraded to the 10MP Olympus 520, which offers me the opportunity to shoot RAW and JPEG formats at the exact same time. So instead of accumulating thousands of shots just mildly compressed with JPEG, I now save that exact same JPEG along with a huge RAW file. This will worsen when I eventually move to 12-, 14-, and 16-megapixel cameras. 

The worst aspect of this photography hobby is that the longer you do it the more likely you are to take numerous redundant shots. Instead of one cool pic of the street corner you take two, three, four…just in case you wiggled a little. I can easily shoot 300 to 400 shots on this camera before the battery drops dead. So I may as well shoot 300 to 400 pics. I promise myself that I'll sort them out later. And I eventually will, but in the meantime they chew up hard disk space like nothing else.

Right now the best solution for backup is a second hard disk. It's the cheapest way to do it. But things get complicated when you overflow a terabyte drive with junk.