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most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data. I hate to pick nits... But my email alone is about 8 GB for the past 25 y

most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data. I hate to pick nits... But my email alone is about 8 GB for the past 25 years. That doesn't include documents, photos, etc... I think we underestimate what Joe Average cares about.

jerf 10y ago
It is very unlikely that you care about all 8GB of that email equally. What you're paying for when you back it all up is the ability to not have to pick and choose, and especially to avoid choosing incorrectly and permanently whacking something you want to keep. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, 1GB is pretty tight. I suspect there's a lot of people who could come up with 1GB of photos they don't care to part with, and coming up with 1GB of valuable home videos is child's play, even assuming efficient encodings of the video rather than the rather flabby stuff that tends to come straight out of consumer cameras or phones. But I bet if most people had to fit the Family Jewels into 10GB, they could, just one more order of magnitude away. Of course HN will have a way-above-average number of people who have way-above-average video recordings and such. Or, perhaps more realistically, call it a single 32GB SD card. At the moment my "family jewels" clocks in at about 90GB, however, that is with no judgment whatsoever about what photos we keep and with a lot of the aforementioned "flabby" videos, not to mention, no judgment whatsoever about what videos we're keeping either.
Dylan16807 10y ago
You have your email on your computer? That's not very average. It mostly comes down to how many photos you take, really.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Depends who you ask and whether its business email or personal. Lots of businesses still use outlook or lotus notes and the email is stored on each client. And then some people like to use what they use at work. When I worked for Nationwide insurance (50 to 60 thousand people) we could keep as much email as we wanted locally, but no more than 100 mb on the server. This is a stupid policy, but it is a common policy.
  - cvwright 10y ago
    Thunderbird downloads everything to the client too.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      It can. It doesn't need to.

jerf 10y ago

It is very unlikely that you care about all 8GB of that email equally. What you're paying for when you back it all up is the ability to not have to pick and choose, and especially to avoid choosing incorrectly and permanently whacking something you want to keep. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, 1GB is pretty tight. I suspect there's a lot of people who could come up with 1GB of photos they don't care to part with, and coming up with 1GB of valuable home videos is child's play, even assuming efficient encodings of the video rather than the rather flabby stuff that tends to come straight out of consumer cameras or phones. But I bet if most people had to fit the Family Jewels into 10GB, they could, just one more order of magnitude away. Of course HN will have a way-above-average number of people who have way-above-average video recordings and such. Or, perhaps more realistically, call it a single 32GB SD card. At the moment my "family jewels" clocks in at about 90GB, however, that is with no judgment whatsoever about what photos we keep and with a lot of the aforementioned "flabby" videos, not to mention, no judgment whatsoever about what videos we're keeping either.

Dylan16807 10y ago

You have your email on your computer? That's not very average. It mostly comes down to how many photos you take, really.

sqeaky 10y ago
Depends who you ask and whether its business email or personal. Lots of businesses still use outlook or lotus notes and the email is stored on each client. And then some people like to use what they use at work. When I worked for Nationwide insurance (50 to 60 thousand people) we could keep as much email as we wanted locally, but no more than 100 mb on the server. This is a stupid policy, but it is a common policy.
- cvwright 10y ago
  Thunderbird downloads everything to the client too.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    It can. It doesn't need to.