No matter how much space you have, you manage to fill it. This old maxim applies equally to the physical and digital realms, as I learned while cleaning up my computers yesterday. With bigger internal and external drives, it’s easy to keep accumulating photos, videos, and downloads until your drive, backup solution, or both run out of room.
In my own case, mirroring data between computers as well as to an external backup drive is one of the culprits, though for as long as it’s feasible, this provides a nice redunancy. The growing threat to that extra space is my photos. It’s not so much the good, “published” photos in my gallery, which grow modestly as I become more discriminating, but the outtakes, which are larger and more numerous with the new camera. These don’t seem worth sorting through or deleting given how plentiful storage space is and the small but non-zero chance I’ll actually have use for some of them. (In practice, I don’t revisit the good shots that often, let alone the ones that didnt’ make the cut.)
Along with some other data like emails and documents more than a year old, it’d be nice to relegate them to a lower tier of backup with perhaps less redunancy, frequency, and accessiblity. Apple’s Time Machine does a bit of this based on age; will a more user-defined extension of this idea ease our perpetual storage crunch?
