The Official DataDoggies Blog

I’ve been using computers for over 25 years now, 15 of them professionally.  I wanted to share with you some of the history, at least from my perspective, of how we’ve stored data over the years.

Back in the 80’s, the only place you could really store data was on a floppy disk, or if you were Daddy Warbucks, you might be able to afford a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk.  There was no real place to back up your information, other than a floppy disk.  And if something happened to that disk, you were done for.  The best we could do to protect ourselves was to make a second copy of the disk, and hope nothing happened to it.

In the early 90’s not much had changed, we still had floppy disks.  The only real difference was instead of carrying around that one disk which stored our whole world,  we now had 20 or 30 of them!  I remember people being very finicky about the handling of those disks too.  While at work one day I casually tossed a floppy over to a co-worker so he could run the diagnostic stored on it.  Of course this disk happened to fly over the desk of our boss, which prompted him to stand up and yell “Stop throwing that disk around!  You’ll knock the bits off it!”.  Of course we knew that was ridiculous, but his point was clear; disks were still not very secure way of storing data.  One crack, one tear, one particle of dust landing the wrong way, and disk was useless.

By the mid to late 90’s, things were improving.  We were now able to burn CDs, which was a great way to archive information.  Unfortunately, burning a single CD back then took almost an hour.  Also, we started to see an explosion in hard drive capacities.  1 gigabyte drives started appearing and by the end of the decade we had 20 gigabyte drives.  Also during this time a wonderful, new technology was starting to make its way to the average person; the Internet.  We weren’t sure exactly sure how at the time, but it was clear that this one technological marvel was going to change the way we worked with computers.

Now we are well into a new millennium, and quite frankly there are more ways of storing data now than I could ever write about.  The short list includes USB flash drives, internal hard drives, external hard drives, CDs and the internet.   The real problem we face now is too many choices.  Most people, confused by so many options, take the simplest route and rely solely on their internal hard drives to store all of their information.  With single hard disks reaching 1500 gigabytes in capacity, it’s really easy to throw all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak.  Unfortunatly, most will never make a single backup of their important files despite all of the options.

One of our most important jobs here at DataDoggies is educating people about the real risk of data loss.  Make sure you check back in the next few weeks as I will be discussing some of the current threats regarding the security of your data, and some of the best methods of protecting yourself.