I’m not alone

I think almost anyone who has a multiple computer household experiences this problem to some extent: I have music, video, pictures, and audiobook files scattered everywhere.   Over the last 14 years or so I’ve been through so many moves from place to place, so many upgrades from different computers, and so many devices it’s all over.  I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole thing when we finally bought a 1TB external drive along with our decently sized 320GB drive on our imac that stays at home, but the collection of media comes from so many places and in so many forms it’s spread out again.  You would think that with One iMac, one macbook, and my computer at work plus the external devices it wouldn’t be too bad, but yet it is.

I know the greatest part of it is located in those two big drives, but where exactly I don’t know.  I also know I have other media scattered on my laptop at least 2 USB drives and my work computer.  Admittedly my work computer has more work related media (TED talks and other conference video or audio related to my research or at least my interests), but there’s other stuff too.

I don’t organize, I search

I’ve long long since given up on trying to organize this stuff.  I let google desktop or spotlight find stuff for me, but I do want to be able to know what’s out there.  With the recent loss of my ipod music (had to restore it, soon to be restored AGAIN) I’ve been hoping to get some more musical variety on my ipod.  I also used to enjoy pandora for music listening and discovery, but since my move from the USA I can longer enjoy that service with using VPN or other means to circumvent ridiculous geographic restrictions.

I know I can go get it all onto the external drive, but then it’s not always readily accessible.  Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a nice idea, but I just don’t have the money to spend on it, and still that really won’t help unless I can get remote access from work to it as the majority of my computing time is at work and I don’t carry a laptop to work anymore.

Online solution?

Dropbox is great for keeping all the files I’m currently working with and my current account limit of 3.25 GB is adequate only for those things, not full-scale storage of my media life.  Not even close.  I don’t think we have that many pictures, but it has to be 4-5 GB of pictures alone.  Music is somewhere in the 70 GB range.  Video isn’t that extensive, perhaps 30 GB.  So let’s just round up to 150 GB.  Is it practical to have all that on the cloud?  It wouldn’t be very cheap, Amazon would want $22.50/month or $270/year, and that’s just for storage, request to use it would be more, though I doubt it would add significantly to the costs.

A Story

I just chatted with an old friend I haven’t seen or talked to in 15 years.  She was telling me about how she was trying to upload some photos to facebook and messed it up, deleted them and is now trying again.  She had to stop chatting with me so she could concentrate on the task.  Admittedly she is 20 years my senior, but things like this are even more important and probably more common in her age group.  I also don’t think that this is much less common for younger folks.  Sure if you have the uberconnected smart phone pictures from that are easily and instantly online where you want them, but what about those pics you take with your camera?  What about if you have multiple cameras?

So what?

This makes me think again of the complexity we deal with because of technology.  We’re all already cyborgs.  When I think of technology’s ability to shape our consciousness, I wonder how much responsibility one should have when designing such systems?  How well is the average user equipped to make good decisions on which products and services to use when you consider how much extra time it takes to maintain and do all these little things that eat up so much of our time?  Will this be the one of differentiators in the future for buying choices? I think so.