Numerous companies, from large to small, offer online storage. Some offer varying degrees of free storage. Yahoo, for example, provides up to 25 gigabytes of free space; America Online and Microsoft offer up to 5 GB (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal).

One highly regarded company, Carbonite.com, charges $49.95 a year for unlimited storage.

But unlimited does not mean fast. Carbonite.com notes on its site, “As a practical matter… the speed of today’s DSL and cable Internet services will make it slow to back up more than, say, a few dozen GB of data.”

Chandler agrees.

“If you have a significant amount of data, and you want to restore all of it, it’s going to take a little while,” by using an online storage site, he said.

“There’s isn’t the network bandwidth enough yet to allow it to happen very quickly.”

Files not getting smaller
The IDC report released last week, and sponsored by data storage corporation EMC, said that in 2007, the digital universe equaled 281 billion gigabytes of data, or about 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth.

That contrasts with the year before, when the firm said 161 billion gigabytes of data was created, representing “about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.”

“In most cases, for the average consumer, you’re talking about needing storage for anywhere from a couple gigabytes to 50 to 100 gigabytes,” Chandler said.

“However, those numbers are all going to increase, because no one seems to be reducing the amount of data that they’re collecting, backing up or generating. And the files don’t seem to be getting smaller.”

Is a terabyte hard drive for TV shows needed because fans of “Dancing With the Stars” or “Lost” want to keep every single episode for posterity?

That’s not it at all, said Serfas of Western Digital.

“With a lot of (TV) content starting to be in high-definition, that hard drive is being filled up very quickly,” she said.

“That’s one of the big, driving factors of needing more storage. It’s not necessarily how long consumers keep the content, but how much they actually record.”

While Western Digital’s DVR expander holds about 300 hours of standard TV programming, when it comes to high-definition programming, it banks 60 hours’ worth.

That’s because HD is richer visual content, which translates to a larger digital footprint in terms of the space required for its digital files.

Ultimately, Coughlin believes, consumers’ enormous digital storage demands may lead to one device with “virtualized, automated management” that deals with all content, “to reduce the complexity of trying to manage all these things in the home.”

“If people have to do all this stuff manually, they won’t do it, and it won’t get done,” he said. “But if there is a machine to do it, that will allow us to beat the odds of conserving content for the future.”

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