To Byte or not to....

I lapped up an external Hard drive during the year end promotional offer at STAPLES recently. I was in a bit of dilemma while choosing the capacity of the Hard drive, whether to go in for a 250GB or its multiples thereof. The Grey cells were trying to process the required capacity that would fulfill my need in the long run. But the dilemma was to put a finger on the exact number of bytes & its billion multiples that would suffice my purpose. Considering that just a few years back my 1 GB pen drive (pic inset) which now appears like one of the solid state radio’s of the 1950 era replete with cathode tubes like resistors seemed to be enough of a backpack for all my digital storage requirement.

But Moore’s law equivalent was relentless, the digital information deluge was far outpacing this one GB summit of mine. With swathes of HD content downloads available on superfast internet highways nowadays, the decision was not easy. And compounding the problem was the fact that last year I landed myself with a small wafer sized pen drive that was now gulping 4GB of data quite effortlessly. It also dawned upon me recently that I needed to take regular backup of my laptop data to keep a BCP in place, just in case the red lettered situation arose. I knew of friends & colleagues who landed themselves in a digital snafu after getting their laptops stolen or when the Hard disk crashed and their teary tales of years of toil & sweat , the rag-picked digital heap all vanishing into thin air, just in a snap of the finger.

Wiping out one such nightmare of my mind, here I was trying to mull over the required bite that I need to put in this byte machine to chew up my necessary data. The store did not offer me much options to choose from but with an offer going on Seagate at Rs 4999 for a 500GB storage device, I reckoned it was a good deal. Now 500 GB I reckon is enough to store about 5000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica. Even this may be a minuscule considering that Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 Petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte (1000GB) and could store about 500 billion pages of text.

Given this complexity it crossed my mind to try out the other option of using the services of web hosting providers and online backup services that are available in plenty today. But that would be too adventurous for me , I for one believe in the motto that my data should belong here under my own hood.