It is very unlikely that you care about all 8GB of that email equally. What you're paying for when you back it all up is the ability to not have to pick and choose, and especially to avoid choosing incorrectly and permanently whacking something you want to keep. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, 1GB is pretty tight. I suspect there's a lot of people who could come up with 1GB of photos they don't care to part with, and coming up with 1GB of valuable home videos is child's play, even assuming efficient encodings of the video rather than the rather flabby stuff that tends to come straight out of consumer cameras or phones.
But I bet if most people had to fit the Family Jewels into 10GB, they could, just one more order of magnitude away. Of course HN will have a way-above-average number of people who have way-above-average video recordings and such. Or, perhaps more realistically, call it a single 32GB SD card. At the moment my "family jewels" clocks in at about 90GB, however, that is with no judgment whatsoever about what photos we keep and with a lot of the aforementioned "flabby" videos, not to mention, no judgment whatsoever about what videos we're keeping either.