As our digital appetites increase, so does our need to store our data.
But as we move into the terabyte age with trillions of bytes of storage available for a few hundred pounds, can we rely on hard disk drives to safeguard precious information? And what happens when they do fail or are damaged?
When I had my first computer in 1983 it had 32KB of memory and it was not until 1988 that I had my first hard drive - which had 40MB of storage.
Almost 20 years later and my main desktop can store 160GB of data while my laptop has 120GB and I have a pocket drive with 40GB more capacity.
My back-up routine is poor - I have my music and photos archived on several DVDs but it has been months since I last backed them up.
If the hard drive in my main computer were to fail, I would lose thousands of photographs and hundreds of songs. Every hard drive is a crash waiting to happen and so it is clear I should invest in a back-up storage system.
Read more
But as we move into the terabyte age with trillions of bytes of storage available for a few hundred pounds, can we rely on hard disk drives to safeguard precious information? And what happens when they do fail or are damaged?
When I had my first computer in 1983 it had 32KB of memory and it was not until 1988 that I had my first hard drive - which had 40MB of storage.
Almost 20 years later and my main desktop can store 160GB of data while my laptop has 120GB and I have a pocket drive with 40GB more capacity.
My back-up routine is poor - I have my music and photos archived on several DVDs but it has been months since I last backed them up.
If the hard drive in my main computer were to fail, I would lose thousands of photographs and hundreds of songs. Every hard drive is a crash waiting to happen and so it is clear I should invest in a back-up storage system.
Read more
