You can live forever digitally for a “nominal price”.
Here’s another contributor to the growth of content in the world: information immortality.
nEternity is offering to keep your digital life – photos, music, your blog – alive and available online forever – independent of your domain or the photo sharing service you’re using.
nEternity may or may not take off. More significant is the trend it points towards: the extension of the lifetime of digital data. Businesses will continue to lengthen their data’s life from here on.
The rules for data retention are changing as digital copies are increasingly the only copies that exist. This will create a new set of businesses focused on extending the life of digital records beyond the current technology on which they are stored. It makes today’s digital archives look downright transitory.
And you thought those backup tapes were troublesome…
Seagate recently launched two portable drives with very different personalities. Why? One size no longer fits all. But which drive is right for you?
Seagate FreeAgent Go - a great personal drive. It’s the thinnest portable drive in the world, with up to 500 GB and a desktop dock.
I use the FreeAgent Go for my personal data. I can drop the Go into a dock at work and easily use the files on my work PC. I don’t have to mix my personal and work content, but have access to both.
Maxtor BlackArmor – a great business drive. It’s the safest drive in the world, with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption and up to 320 GB.
I use the BlackArmor for backing up my work files. I keep it at home as a simple disaster recovery scheme. There is absolutely no risk of anyone accessing the data without the password, even if it were to fall out of my bag at a hacker’s convention.
Unlike traditional storage solutions that are add-on afterthoughts and don’t always work well together, CentralAxis BE puts the content first. It’s a single central storage solution that makes managing the changing demands for storage simpler and safer as a business grows:
Easy to install and manage with a compact design and anywhere access. Staff can access and share data from anywhere via the web.
One system for the entire company with up to 2 terabytes of space. One system works for all employees across Windows and Mac OSes.
Safety for all a company’s data with automatic backups for up to 20 PCs that save up to ten historical versions of information. Backups are mirrored across two drives for added safety. Plug an external drive into a USB port for rotating backups offsite.
Need more space? Add another CentralAxis BE.
At some point you’ll probably need a more complicated solution. You can put your IT department on that task…once your big enough to hire one.
My first blog post a year ago was about my full drive on my work PC. Since then I’ve expanded to 100 gigabytes. Nothing like my home PC, but work space requirements tend to be lower.
I’m in the midst of changing my backup method from a local desktop backup drive to a BlackArmor portable drive. It allows me to backup my work remotely. It’s got Seagate Secure technology, which means it’s hackproof – no worries about losing sensitive information.
I expect my next laptop to have a Seagate Secure encrypted drive inside as well.
Someday it will be considered stupid – and maybe illegal – to use a hard drive that’s not self-encrypting in a business PC.
One of the biggest inhibitors to Cloud Storage for backups has been that businesses don’t want to lose control of their data. Drunken Data mounted the soapbox on this topic Monday. No matter what assurances a Cloud service makes, it’s hard not to feel safer with data on-site.
The EVault Express Recovery Appliance stages backups locally, allowing transfers to the Cloud over time. The incremental costs for the appliance are small compared to conventional 100% on-site backup. Near-term recovery time is quicker, but maybe more important is the emotional benefit of having recent backups within the company walls (locally or at a remote facility).
This pragmatic tweak to the Cloud Storage model could open up the business market for SaaS in a big way. What do you think?
1.HD broadcast/media is going mainstream. HD video takes 4 times the space of SD video on PCs, DVRs and the web infrastructure.
2. Higher fidelity music downloads. Apple and others race to make their music “better”, which means more megabytes per song.
3. Change in the personal media consumption model from “play” to “record”. We used to listen to phone messages, watch TV and play music. Now we archive emails, collect videos online and build a music library.
4. The expanding digital class in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Most of the planet’s population is in countries where millions of digital consumers will be created even in tough times.
5. Microsoft Vista traction. Vista is finally becoming the dominant OS. It’s a catalyst for consumer and business content.
6. Growth in home backup storage. Mainstream consumers are finally fearing the “digital housefire” enough to back up their PCs to external storage and online services.
7. Increasing mobile content consumption. iPhone and its peers multiply mobile video consumption, creating even more video to be kept somewhere.
8.Photo de-compression. More people are keeping their photos in “raw” format, taking up magnitudes more space. And megapixels continue to grow.
9.Increase in video downloads and views. Hulu.com, iTunes and Amazon Unbox are increasing video consumption for the web massses, which drives consumer and infrastructure storage.
10.The monetization of content. The 99 Cent Song and the Ten Dollar Movie have us all equating our content with cash, driving new demand to store and protect it more like money. That creates more copies.
15. Increased financial regulation. The technological result will be more data saved for longer periods, and not just by banks.
16. More companies complying with information regulation. SOX and HIPAA data regulations are finally getting legs, driving more companies to store more to comply.
Digital content is no longer a discretionary item. That’s just as true for consumers as for businesses. Content and the storage to keep It will grow through whatever economic disruption awaits us in the coming year or two.
When the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was first conceived, it was a radical new aproach to getting around. By building out a new infrastructure, personal travel was transformed. It affected much more than transportation though. The housing industry, economic development, city centers and leisure travel all went through significant and unforeseen shifts due to faster and easier transport. There’s only so much you can predict.
i365 is one of a growing horde of companies riding the rails of a virtual equivalent of the Interstate Highway System – the internet - to provide faster and easier (and safer?) management of their data.
The internet is on a path to have a bigger impact on society than the advent of cars and highways. And like the Interstate System, who knows really what that will mean in 20 years?
I’m excited to see Seagate jumping in with both feet.
Until recently, storage was an inside game. Disk drive vendors focused almost exclusively on satisfying the PC, server and storage system makers of the world with the right storage component for their box.
The Rise of the Digital Consumer is changing things. Storage has become a personal thing because what it stores is the increasingly precious digital stuff that is piling up in our lives. And as this New York Times article explains, that storage is increasingly a standalone, purposeful device that takes its job seriously.
Seagate is now one of those “makers” that consumers turn to in outfitting their digital lifestyle. Thus the TV ads, and in general a sharper focus on storage solutions for the consumer.
I added up all the data storage in my home office, just for kicks: 652 gigabytes. Two thirds is disk-based, most of the other third is optical.
Pretty pedestrian quantities - I mostly work out of a Seagate office, so our home office is literally that.
I’m satisfied for now with my manual disaster recovery system – although I don’t rotate my offsite backups nearly often enough. As I download more video, I’m considering a move to online backup to complement my backup drive.
How much storage is in your home office? I’m sure you can top mine.
Content comes first, opening up new uses and usefulness
Seagate announced Maxtor CentralAxis today, a really cool New Thing in home storage. Until now, external storage devices have mostly been storage add-ons for a PC. Even the NAS devices out there have focused on providing a “PC drive for the home”. It’s shareable storage, but shackled to the PC model.
CentralAxis puts the content first, rather than the PC. That opens up uses that until now have been reserved for the techies among us:
OS-independent content sharing. Content doesn’t have to decide to be Windows or Mac OS X, and can be used by either one.
File sharing with DLNA-compliant devices like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems. Easily watch videos and view photos on TV screens instead of a PC.
Access content directly via the web. CentralAxis allows this with a simple username and password, without going through a PC or compromising a network firewall.
CentralAxis does all the “home storage” basics as well: 1 TB capacity, centralized backups from PCs on the network, etc. But it’s the new approach to content that makes it a game changer.
