A Bigger Box

It all started with a lucky nickle.  Then a fancy strand of string.  You put your treasures in a small box tucked in the corner of your bottom dresser drawer.  Then you got an award at school, a shiny rock, a trophy and a bigger box.  The box moved to a corner in your closet and got bigger.  Then it became a stack of boxes.  They moved to a corner in the garage and eventually took up a whole wall in the garage.  The car now sat in the driveway and you were stuffing boxes in the rafters.  You rented a small storage unit easing the pressure.  You got a second unit, then a third.  You found an abandoned warehouse and felt relieved by all the empty space.  The space filled up so slowly that you never worried about it; until if filled up.  You acquired a lease on the building next door and filled it up. You found more buildings and started looking at empty aircraft hangars in the desert.

My questions.  Does it make sense to store that much stuff? At what point do you decide to get rid of some of your old stuff?  Where do you get started?

Compare this to computers.  How many hard drives do you have?  How full is your gmail account or other online storage areas?

Last year, 24 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Now it is 48 hours of video every minute

Google gmail gives 193 million users 2 GB of memory.  That's about 1/2 million 1 TB hard drives.  Recently gmail servers crashed.

I try to clean house as I go but I'm still trying to figure out my strategy for making sure that my most valuable digital possessions are saved when it comes time to foreclose on the warehouses.   I wonder when we'll start hearing about a"data storage" crisis.