Damn 1 Terra Byte of Memory is cheap now.
 

I need to back up several computers and need to move a lot of Data.



WOW 1 TB USB memory sticks are only $20.





https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1+tb+flash+drive&crid=3QU0S7O1G1Y7U&sprefix=1+ tb%2Caps%2C278&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_5_4

^^^ Remembering when the first memory sticks came out....$20 wouldn't get you 2 KB...right?

the first 5 1/4 floppy disk was only 360K. The first 3" floppy was only 1.2 meg I believe.

3.5 inch floppies were typically 720K at first and then 1.44 MB.

My first hard drive was a huge 10 MB drive!

What blows my mind is the digital camera we use to shoot obliques is a Canon 5DRs and every image is 238MB (7907x5271 pixels) when saved as a TIF file. I went through several computers before I had a hard drive big enough to save that file to.

Now I have a computer system with 256 Gig of RAM, two 2TB M.2 drives and a 14 TB RADI5 all in the one computer. We have a client that uses Amazon Web Services and he has a blazing fast speed. When I upload to him it pegs out at 42 Mbps and downloads are screaming fast in the hundreds of Mbps.

I remember paying over $100 for a huge 64 Gig thumb drive. Now they are cheap as heck. I would not trust them for long term storage, but for moving files around they are nice. Just be sure they are USB 3.1 USB2 will just crawl for transfer speed.

Incredible how much data can be stuffed on something so small now.

My career was in printing and publishing. In the '80's, a typesetter was showing me her new imagesetting storage device - it was a machine as big as a chest freezer that spun a disc that was as big around as a Mexican sombrero. I wish I could tell you how many bits that disc held. I can't.
I've used all the floppies, all the media from bernoulli to syquest and had my work and storage transformed by the use of the cheap zip drive and suddenly ubiquitous 100mb zip discs.

The size and cost of modern storage still blows my mind. I doubled the ram in my first Mac from 2mb to 4mb (2 sticks of 2mb each, replacing 2 sticks of 1mb each, ha ha) and it only cost me 50 bucks. That was half the price of the upgraded ram when that particular Mac launched.

Be very careful.

A good number of those no name drives are bogus.

If you’ve never heard of the brand and it’s stupid cheap be like Forrest Gump and run.

In the early part of my career, I had to put together a business case to justify a new 1T data warehouse and present it to our CEO for funding. I don’t recall the numbers but it had to be 6 figures if it went to that level.

Good advice. I will use one of these for a backup to my backup to my backup to my backup......:cool:

"Never turn your back on digital" - Bob Ludwig

"If your data isn't stored in three separate places, you don't have it." - unknown

My brother worked for Microsoft starting 1988. I visited him at work waay back. He giggled as he showed me his new computer with a 1gig hard drive. He said he would never use all that capacity. Funny.

My 1st 1 GB drive was $3,000.00 and the size of a cinder block.

Pay attention to read/write speeds though. I still stick with SSDs with cables for the USB 3.2 speeds. These sticks are great for convenient file sharing/transfer.

Thanks for that trip down memory lane! I remember in the early 90s we would download all the files for a complete magazine onto a Syquest disc and FedEx it our printer. It seems like there was always an unreadable disc or file error when they opened it. The problem was so common they had a policy of checking each disc for bad disc or file errors as soon as they received it, even if they weren’t scheduled to use it for days.

My IBM clone had DUAL floppy drives!
I opted to not spend the $300 on a well used 5 Mb hard drive when given the chance but did spend the $120 to buy the extra 112k of memory chips to go from 528k to 640k!

We had several Syquest drives and yea, not super reliable. Same with Zip drives and a click of death.

Back then we bought a digital tape drive to archive projects and it had a huge 2 GB capacity, but it was super slow to backup or retrieve.

When DVD burners we used a lot of them burn CDs and DVDs. A DVD with the huge (back then) capacity of 4.2 GB was great. Now I upload 400 GB files and bigger to our customers. I still have a stack of CDs and DVDs in a cabinet that I have not used in years.

The only time we send a physical thumb drive now is to the organizations that have an IT department that shuts off all electronic transfer. I had one client have to take her laptop to McDonald's to download her file, then return to work.

I remember having relatively good luck with the Zip discs. Maybe it's because all the different SyQuest drives and cartridges were such crap that the Zip was a revelation in comparison.

Ahh 100mb Zip drive cartridges for $10/ea. 640x480 pics that only took two minutes to d/l.
Lovely times.

Be careful ordering the super cheap large thumb drives from Amazon. My business partner ordered some a year ago. The package arrived and it had several sets of low quality fake apple ear phones. and some other garbage. No thumb drives. I had to protest it with my credit card company to get the refund. It was just a bunch off knock off crap. I threw it all in the trash.