Awk! My storage needs are exploding! Here’s some updated info and analysis on my rate of storage consumption for video and still image media.
With my old digital camera, I was shooting just under 2Gb of data per year, which was comprised of almost all still images. Since September, when I bought my Sanyo Xacti C5, the overall size of my iPhoto library has more than doubled, and the year isn't even over yet!
As you can see, my storage consumption rates have roughly increased by a factor of 5 since I bought my new digital media camera. (The upward trend starting in July corresponds to my use of my father-in-laws Casio Exilim, which had video-mode capture.)
Shooting both video clips and still images, and using the relative trends from previous years, I estimate I’ll be creating media at a rate of about 20Gb/yr.
When I extrapolate this trend out several years, I get a sense of how much storage I'm going to need. Not only am I showing the effects of my current camera, but I've also predicted another camera in 4 years time, which would again increase the rate of media creation.
Now, my iPhoto library is 15Gb, and my PowerBook has a 100Gb HD which is effectively full. When I start shopping for a new laptop next year, I'm going to need internal storage that will accommodate 3 more years of media generation, which is going to reach 100Gb of storage consumption. So, my next laptop (I imagine it will be a MacIntel PowerBook) will need to have a 300Gb to 500Gb HD inside. I'm not sure that will happen, though... the largest laptop drive I can find is only 160Gb.
If I extrapolate out to 10 years, my media will exceed 1 terabyte. Keep in mind that this is media I am generating, not media that I am buying/renting, so storage lockers like the one Bob recently discusses won't be applicable. In fact, Bob also recently discussed the economics of free storage, but used a measly 2Gb GMail as the baseline. I'm already well beyond that.
Let's extrapolate even further. Assuming my children marry in their early 30s, I'll be handing them an archive of their lives that will likely approach 10 terabytes in size, and will probably be stored using holographic technology.
And when I reach my 120th birthday, I can imagine having an archive of personal media reaching 100s or even 1000s of petabytes in size. In order to ensure this, I'll need to back up often, which should ideally involve 3x or more storage.
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