KEY POINTS:
Warning! What you are about to read may put you to sleep. It contains boring sentences. Such as: My disk is full. And: I've got too many digital photos.
There is pitiably banal nostalgia: Where once I kept hundreds of envelopes of prints stuffed in drawers, now I keep my photos on scores of CDs scattered on shelves by the computer.
There are soporific statistics: Of the 46 trillion pages printed in 2005 only 8 per cent were from digital printing.
And mind-numbing projections: The amount of content stored on PCs, set-top boxes and other electronic devices in a typical networked home will increase from 800 gigabytes today to over four terabytes by 2010.
If you're still awake, those are just a few brief examples of the most tedious topic in the world - computer storage. It is on a par with watching paint dry and is affectionately referred to by the IT press as snorage.
But while not much happens - stuff gets stored - it does produce some of the most vexing questions of our time. How big is your disk? How big is enough? How long will it last? And the optimistic: Do you back up?
It has been known for some time that the answer to the first question is irrelevant because the unwritten law of PCs is that no matter how big your disk, it will always fill up. That makes the answer to the second question irrelevant too - your disk will never be big enough.
The answer to the third question is equally disheartening. Digital media - especially the burned CD format - don't always last that long. If you look after them, it is thought that CD-Rs should be readable 1000 times or more and last several hundred years. But if you're careless, or just unlucky, shelf life can be one or two years.
Worse, your hard disk's mechanism could fail at any time and you could lose a lifetime of photos, music and other baggage in the blink of an eye. IT folk always ask if you back up (knowing full well that most people can't be bothered) simply because they want to torment you.
So what's a hapless PC user to do? I came face to face with these problems recently on a trip to Beijing courtesy of Hewlett-Packard, which wanted to show "the next frontier" - the digital home.
HP's answer to the storage nightmare is to hook up all the home storage devices - PCs, notebooks, set-top boxes, iPods etc - to a whopping centralised device on a network. In theory, the hub would have enough smarts to automatically back up all the devices on a regular basis. Sounds great, if expensive - and somehow you know it will be at least 10 years before it becomes an affordable reality.
Meanwhile, along with burning CDs and DVDs, HP's pocket media and USB flash drives provide another relatively painless way to copy important stuff.
Not surprisingly for the top maker of inkjet printers, HP also suggests printing your photos. HP, of course, is focused on the market opportunities. It estimates that there were 140 billion digital photos captured in 2005 and only 33 billion printed. (Where do they get these numbers?) By 2010 HP is looking hungrily towards the prospect of printing some 80 billion photos.
As a low-tech backup plan I've come to think printing is not a bad idea. After all, paper has lasted for centuries. But if you really want your photos to last a long time without the colour fading, you do need to do some research on which paper and inks to use.
HP makes big claims about its new advanced paper and inks - capable of resisting fading under glass for 100-plus years - but herein lies another problem. Where to put the stuff? I've already got drawers and trunks filled with snaps from the earlier age of film photography and now to keep my digital treasures safe I should be printing more.
I guess I'll have to restack the cardboard boxes and tea chests under the house.
