Re: OT: Apple II archives and disk media

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

M. Pender wrote:

<snip>

>This led me to the observation that the capacity of disk storage technology
>may be increasing at a rate higher than the rate at which people actually
>produce any new content.  If so, then a day is coming in which, for example,
>all of the music ever recorded could be stored on a single disk (or other
>media).  Similarly, all of the movies recorded up until a point in time
>could be recorded on a single piece of media.

This is the case, at least for the foreseeable future.

Both content production and storage capacity are increasing at an
exponential rate (assuming that content production is a linear function
of population).  But storage density is growing at a much faster rate
(approximately doubling every year), while (thankfully) population is
doubling over a much longer time scale.

I have used this phenomenon for many years to keep everything
I have ever saved.  Whenever I upgrade systems or disks, I copy
the entire content of the previous drive to an "Old-C" directory on
the new drive.  It usually requires less than 20% of the new drive,
and it means that I have a searchable history of _everything_.

-michael

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