In this day and age of storing your entire existence on fragile, silver, magnetic platters, the thing you never want to know is you have a dead hard drive. Somehow, as you attempt to boot up that honking brick of plastic, you try to tell yourself that this isn’t the end. And if it was, then what can you do about it, really? There are always talks of backing up and redundancy, but, seriously, when the hard drive is a hundred times or more larger than the optical discs that you would be burning its content onto, do you seriously think that backing up your hard drive is the first thing you think about?
And what do you really do when the contents of your hard drives are more along the line of video captures that run multiple gigabytes each? How do you back those things up then? Buy another hard drive to backup that hard drive? At some point it’s sort of become this act of cryogenically freezing a copy of a copy of a copy of your head to make sure you live to Eternity. Only to find out that the cryogenic lab lost power one night, and all of your heads went the way of rat food. Oh, that’s right! You were supposed to store the backups of those backups at multiple sites. Just in case these things happen.
I’m not really sure how to solve this problem. I have drives that hold my past design works and photographs. Obviously I’m due to backup the contents of those drives onto larger drives. But then it’s sort of a never-ending proposition.
Just today I was thinking that I should backup the photos I have been taking on my Android phone (Yes, I have an Android phone. Because I’m creative.). So I updated my Dropbox app, and it automatically asked me if I want to back up my photos. Oh, rejoice, I thought! Of course, I’ll do that. Anyway, that was at 3:30PM PST. Now it’s almost 11PM, and we still have about 1,000 images left to upload.
We seem to have been accumulating so much of these digital files. It’s fine that I no longer have to purchase 20 rolls of film when I go travel somewhere. Or buy all those tapes to shoot those vacation videos. But then I end up having issue with storage—and storage that I know at some point will die on me. However, if the answer then is to send them all to the Cloud, then the questions are: 1) How much space will I need on the Cloud to hold everything that I have created? 2) What kind of bandwidth do I need to send every up into this Computer Networking Heaven without going to my own Heaven before the files finish uploading? 3) Finally, the last question, of course, is can I really trust that the God of the Cloud will continually do a nightly backup of my existence so that I won’t end up losing my digital soul when it all accidentally disappears?
Well, the hard drive didn’t die. The plug on it was, however. Thank God. So I just had find another one from my numerous collection of external hard drives to replace it. I mean, if you see someone lying still, and you think they might be dead, isn’t the first thing you do is get a stick and poke the person to see if you’ll get a response?
