How much walkin’ around data do you carry?

I was getting ready for meeting with students today, getting out of the ragged summer clothes into slightly more formal apparel, when I noticed something I take for granted: my pocket data. You’ve all got that, right? That little collection of tiny flash drives that you have handy for on the fly data transfers? I tallied mine up.

In my pocket I have a 256GB USB device.

I also have a card wallet with:

• 3 64Gb SD cards
• 2 64GB micro SD cards
• 1 128GB SD card
• 1 16GB SD card (it came with my camera)

That’s a total of 720GB just jingling like pocket change as a I walk around. I don’t keep anything particularly valuable on any of them, they’re mostly there in case I need to shuffle around some video or images or a class presentation — all the valuable stuff is on the home computer storage (500GB internal ss drive, a 4TB and 2TB external drive) and backed up in a few places.

But it got me thinking how insanely rich I am with data storage…and some of you might have more. When I got my first home computer back in 1979, we measured everything in K, and floppies didn’t fit in your pocket. Then in the late 80s, it went up to M — my first hard drive (don’t ask how much it cost) had a 5 megabyte capacity, and I was stunned with the amount of space I had. Now everything is in Gs, with a few Ts in there, and eventually we’ll all be hauling multiple terabytes of casual storage around.

What are we going to do with it all?