Memory is cheap
From the moment I laid eyes on a 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) external hard drive selling for P9,000 at an IT expo I have coveted one. I have always wanted to have a million million bytes of memory storage, but until recently they were too expensive.
Four or five years ago a friend bought a 320 GB La Cie external hard drive for P20,000. For a time he felt like the king of geeks — able to store huge files without blinking! Then he edited a movie on his computer and realized that when it comes to seriously large files, 320 GB is not that impressive.
When it comes to memory I am a size-ist: It’s 1 terabyte or nothing. Do I really need 1,000 gig? Probably not, unless I digitize my entire music and movie library. The real value to me of the terabyte hard drive is security: I can stop worrying that some vital file will be lost.
Not that technology solves everything. Another friend was confident that his files were safe on his 80 GB external drive. Some weeks ago, the four-year-old external drive started acting up so he called his dealer for service. A technician picked it up, but before he could bring it to the shop for repairs, he was mugged. There’s a non-digital security problem.
Granted, I’ve always been obsessive about keeping copies. In grade school I would take notes in class on ‘scratch’ paper, then copy them neatly onto my notebooks. In high school I would draft articles longhand in notebooks, then type them onto bond paper. In college I photocopied the typescripts of my stories, and when I got my first computer I kept hard copies along with files on floppy disk.
I think the habit of making copies has actually enhanced my memory. Which probably means I don’t have to keep copies to remember information. But if I didn’t keep copies, I wouldn’t have been trained to remember. So I’d have to keep copies anyway. In any case I’m the one my friends text when they need to recall a piece of trivia. Sometimes I feel like Google.
My faith in diskettes as backup storage was dashed when I was working at my old paper. Our section was equipped with Mac II desktop computers; I saved my columns onto a desktop folder and backed up on diskettes which I took home. Months later I looked up an article I’d saved on a diskette. Many files were corrupted, and some diskettes were completely unreadable.
Some years ago I figured out a way to keep backups that I could access from any computer. I opened several Gmail accounts, which now give 7,000 megabytes each of free storage. Some I use for correspondence, one for subscriptions to websites, one for storing photos when I am traveling, and some — whose addresses I don’t give out — for backup. Then I e-mail important files to myself. When I submit assignments by e-mail, I just BCC one of my other Gmail accounts. It’s easy, convenient, and it costs me nothing.
Two weeks ago I finally treated myself to a 1 TB Western Digital Elements external hard drive. It’s about the size of a hardcover book, and weighs two pounds. This portable gadget can hold 440 hours of DVD, or about a quarter of a million mp3s. Plug it in, connect to your system with the USB 2.0, and that’s it. My friend Kermit says the street price should be about P7,000; I saw the 500 GB version from the same manufacturer selling at the mall for P9,000, so I’m still gloating. The La Cie 1 TB drive costs P19,000; more gloating.
My plan was to back up files manually. However, when I connected the external drive to my computer, my MacBook Marat (I name my machines; they last a long time so they must appreciate being treated like humans) asked me if I wanted to use the device as my Time Machine backup disk.
Although the name Time Machine inevitably disappoints — it does not take you back to the future — it automatically copies and stores all the files on your Mac every day, every hour if you choose. This way you can look at Time Machine on May 24, 2010 and see exactly how your computer looked and what it contained on, say, May 24. When your backup disk is full, the earliest files are deleted to make room for the latest files. With a million-million-byte capacity, that should take a while. I’m calling my terabyte drive “Rahm”, after the very colorful chief of staff of US President Barack Obama.
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