Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

100GB for 30 years? Well, I'm not sure about average cases, but personally I have collected a stack of about a dozen of hard drives (volume ranging from 60GB to 2TB) over last 15 years. All fully loaded with the digital junk - because why delete things when you can just leave them?

Most of the data in that digital fossils is movies from that bay with pirates, but I guess there's still much more than 100GB of self-produced information - message (email, IM, phone) archives, digitized drawings, RAW photos, source code, savegames and so on.

Obviously, one could sort out the trash and compact the rest (like extracting a 10KB patch from several-gigabyte OpenWRT source tree, or radically compacting photo collection by deleting bad shots) and fit into 3GB/yr quota, but that's a hard and - unless one really wishes to fit some storage quota instead of just buying another hard drive - mostly pointless work.

This service isn't really meant for storing things like your music and video collection, or even your day-to-day chats. I think the analogy of a safe-deposit box at the bank really describes it well. You wouldn't keep your DVD or CD collection at the bank, because storing it would be expensive and your collections are most likely easily replaced. But you might want to keep your wedding pictures, the video of your kid's first step, birth and death certificates, love letters, and important legal documents in a safe deposit box at the bank. You might even store something like your great-grandmother's wedding ring and other historic documents. Essentially all the stuff that would be difficult to replace, and would be worth keeping for the sake of posterity.

Given this, I think 100 GB is probably an acceptable amount of storage for this day and age. That may change in 5 or 10 years time as technologies change and the size of images and videos expand. But in 5 to 10 years time, services like this will probably have changed to keep up with the times.

I couldn't have put it better, thank you!

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