Storing Files - Part 2

Initial Conclusion

The initial conclusion I reach is that most consumers have no need for all of the storage capacity of the hard drives and the larger SSDs they get when they buy a Mac. So most consumers will continue to have their storage on local hard drives or SSDs with more capacity than they need, no transition to online primary storage, and limited transition to online backup. Within five years, I think that consumer level personal computers will all have SSDs, not hard drives. You can already purchase a MacBook Air with 256 GB SSD or a MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD. They are still a bit expensive, but based on Moore's Law, we can expect that within two years 512 GB SSDs at reasonable prices will be a standard offering of PC manufacturers.

Note - One benefit of larger drives is that we will need fewer drives if we have really substantial storage needs and that will simplify the storage process.

Businesses, on the other hand, will probably transition to online primary and backup storage. This may well push personal computer manufacturers to offer personal computers with less storage, leading to cheaper units entering the consumer marketplace.

Multiple Device Users

All that is fine and dandy, but there is another trend which cuts across the first two. Many of us are multiple device users - desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones - and we want to have access to our files from all our "computers". Therefore, we need to figure out how and where we are going to store those files.

As discussed in my column entitled "Integrating Mac and iPad," published in the September 2012 Newsletter, I decided to store in Evernote all new files relating to computer usage, politics, current events, Mac groups, and a weekly discussion group in which I participate. Evernote is an app that stores all files in the cloud and locally on whatever devices run the app if you are a Premium user ($45 a year). I run Evernote on my iMac and my iPad.

There are other applications, such as Dropbox, GoodReader, Notability, Simplenote, SoundNote, etc., which can perform storage functions similar to Evernote, but they don't do it as well as Evernote and don't have as powerful a search capability.

It seems we are now entering what I call the age of concurrent storage, i.e., storing files almost simultaneously both locally and online. Whether that service will be provided by businesses whose primary purpose is online storage or by businesses which offer a specialized service with synchronization as a key feature is yet to be determined.

You cannot currently do an iPad-wide search on the iPad so, to the extent that you can concentrate your files in one app, there is less searching to do on the iPad. Files on the iPad are stored with the app used to create them.

My next step is to move most of the relevant files indicated above into Evernote. Once that is done (if ever), I can then consider moving other files into Evernote. Logically that would mean that all data files, even photos, videos and music, could end up in Evernote. I doubt I will go that far, but the implication is that Evernote can become a giant database with powerful search capabilities. One might begin to think of it as a sort of an operating system. Perhaps.

Evernote does not limit the total size of storage you can have. It has folders (which are called notebooks) and tags. A Premium user is limited to 250 notebooks, 10,000 tags and 100,000 files. Premium users can upload 50 GB per month and maximum file size is 100 MB. Thus, Evernote currently cannot hold all your files, but it certainly can hold a substantial quantity of them. Mail, photos and music-type files can be held in the specialized Apple applications - Mail, iPhoto and iTunes - all of which can hold in one way or another all these files online and available to your devices, but not taking up storage capacity in Evernote.

Conclusion

I think consumers will continue to store all their files locally rather than online for perhaps the next 5 or 10 years, but the growing recognition of the need to access files from multiple devices should mean that there will be a gradual growth, perhaps plodding, of concurrent storage, i.e., synchronized local and online storage.

Mark Bazrod, MLMUG Newsletter Editor and President

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