The personal computer has been around for quite a while, but only in the last decade or so has it become so integrated into our lives that we are now totally dependent on it. In this time, we have gathered more and more digital data. This is starting to cause a real dilemma. While our ability to store all this data locally has increased, do we need to store all of it on our main data drive? While it might be nice to have, do we need 10 years (or more) of files or should we be archiving older files to an off line storage solution, where it is available if we need it.? Moving this data will make the programs that access them much faster, and will place less burden on the computer, which has to track the location of all these files.
The question is, how and where to store these archives? and for how long? What is archivable and what files should be deleted from storage? In what format do you store the archived files? All questions that are really tough to answer. I have no answer now, but I hope to address some of these in future blog posts, so stay tuned!