Today I didn't bill for my time. I couldn't. I finally hit the wall on hard drive space; a problem I've been ignoring for way too long.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely irresponsible on this front. I do run backup software and keep an up-to-the-hour image of everything that happens on my drive each day. The problem I'm talking about has more to do with the shear volume of digital stuff we keep these days. Mail, pictures, music, documents, code, notes, recipes you name it, seems like everything we do these days is stored digitally and the delima of what to do with it all is catching up with me.

On our last trip to Canada my children averaged 1 GB pictures per week. In and of itself that's not too much data, but what do you do with years of this stuff? I'm putting the temporary solution in place today: 400 GB drives installed in a Windows 2000 machine mirrored as one drive. In theory this should give me roughly 400 GB of storage with a redundant, always up-to-date, backup. However, we lost two drives in one machine last summer due to a power surge. Hmmmm... it's on a UPS now, but... still makes we wonder. So, my plan is to add one more 400 GB external drive via USB 2.0 and back up my storage drive at least once a week. I figure that's the best I can do, at least in my price range.

However, all of this still does not solve the long term problem; it just delays it. Whether it's a year from now or five years from now we are eventually going to run out of space on this 400 GB drive. Then what? Hopefully there will be larger drives at an affordable price, but this all seems somewhat absurd, not to mention volitile.

Thus the delima: how do we cope in a digital world? What are the right solutions? What are the wrong solutions? What do we do with all this digital stuff?