My New Toy

Thank god that my mom bought us an extra suitcase to go home with. After the splurging at the outlet malls, at the bookstore, and at Best Buy, we filled it up without a problem.

While I was ultimately unsuccessful in my bid to convince Ann of the need for a new digital camera with my infallible arguments (“Ann, that camera is 3 years old at least. We need a better one! Pleeeeeeeeeze. IwantitIwantitIwantit.”), I WAS successful in getting at least one new electronic gadget: an external hard drive.

I bought a 160GB Seagate external USB drive, which I was able to just plug into my XP machine at home (with the addition of a 220/110 power converter). And suddenly, all my space worries are gone. My old machine had 75 gigs of space, of which about fifty were used. I defragged it regularly, but I just didn’t like the idea that I was filling up my hard drive. Plus, with my new found love for BitTorrent and downloading large files over the Internet, I knew I was going to need a lot of space.

160 was actually the low end of the spectrum, but since the price-per-gig remained constant at $1 no matter how large a drive I bought, I figured 160 should do me just fine. We’ll see.

I think about computing issues more and more with an eye toward the long term. Wondering how I will transport all the data that I accumulate through life, all the pictures, MP3s, work and school stuff, illegal TV and movie downloads, as I migrate from machine to machine throughout life. I expect that our external drives that we carry around will replace the old photo albums and scrapbooks. I wonder if I’ll go through the old folders at some point in the future, exclaiming, “Oh, remember when we had that crappy 3 megapixel digital camera? Man, those were the days.”

Ultimately, some kind of external storage unit seems to make a lot of sense, for both storage and backup reasons. I could have bought a DVD burner and burned 4 gigs of stuff at a time, but DVDs are expensive, plus, who wants to do all that work? All you do is install the software, push the button, and now my machine gets backed up automatically every day. What could be easier?

Now I just have to make sure that nothing happens to the backup…