A Life on Record

A Tweet came up recently from someone bemoaning that they now live their life on record whereas they used to live their life on play.

Instead of listening to answer-phone messages and deleting them, they now find themselves archiving and organising emails.

Instead of listening to CDs, they find themselves tagging and organising their MP3s.

Instead of taking pictures, they find themselves tagging, retouching and organising their photos.

I guess that we are all like that now; constantly indexing, organising and then archiving the minutea of everyday life. I've lost count of the number of times I've retagged my MP3 collection, iTunes is re-importing them now after I lost a hard-disk. Will I ever find time to listen to them all? I doubt it, at the last count, I had over 56 days of music to listen to but I like to have it all to hand just in case.

If only I had a way of putting it all into store and then just recalling it when I need it; if only I had a home ILM system which would allow me to securely and reliably save my important data. I really don't want to have to re-encode all my CDs (I own a great deal of the music I have, I'm not perfect but if I like something, I try to buy it).

At the moment, I'm sitting typing this on a PC which has over two terabytes of storage on it and probably another two terabytes or so on various 'NAS appliances'. How do I back-up? Well, all my important stuff is replicated but if the house burns down…well, most of my photos are stored on external storage providers because I simply can't replace them but the rest of my digital life? Some of my emails are on gmail (backed-up to home).

But my music? My DVDs? Various failed projects? Half written articles…I need to get some of this offsite at some point. I've wasted hours, probably days re-installing operating systems and applications; so I'm actually now backing up the primary disks so that I can quickly re-build my brain.

And at least I'm actually technically capable of at least attempting to stitch together all the various applications which go towards building a half decent home-backup solution. But perhaps 'the Cloud' will come to rescue us; if you look at where Centera came from all those years ago before EMC bought it and turned it into a corporate archiving solution.

Hey guys, perhaps it is nearly time to re-launch something like a managed Centera solution aimed at the home market; people are beginning to have enough bandwidth to use something like this as a service. Like Mozy on steroids!! But it's got to integrate with iTunes, Lightroom, Office, Outlook, Gmail; it's got to be able to stream to my mobile devices and transcode on the fly.

Now that'd be a product!!! Forget about all this corporate bollocks!!!