I recall my first hard drive: 60MB (that’s megabytes) for a mere $600. A bargain! Now, a 6 terabyte drive—one that stores 100,000 times more data—costs as little as $100. The problem is no longer storage, but backing up that storage so that when (not if, sadly) your drive fails, you have not lost precious trillions of bytes of images and movies.
I’ve advocated a typical strategy for years: make a nightly clone of your startup volume for ease of fast recovery; have a secured internet-hosted backup, at least for critical documents; and swap two drives on a regular basis for local backup, so you always have a store of all your older data that can’t be destroyed by fire or other disaster or stolen from your home or work. (A simpler version is often summarized as 3-2-1: three copies, two local, one offsite.)
