Today I've set aside for the task of making backups for my computer files. People sometimes ask what the little boxes with wires and lights are on my computer desk. I explain that they are external hard drives. These days, drives are cheaper to maintain than burning to disc. I can just take all of my files and dump them into a bin of yearly accumulations.
The files I share on JSVB are compressed by necessity. Blogger now allows me five gigabytes of free storage. By using compression, I've so far used one tenth of one percent of my allotted space online. On the other hand, I don't worry about compressing my work files. I will leave them uncompressed until the final step, where I transform a Photoshop or Painter file into something common like a .JPG image file. Since the work files (and my master copies of good artwork) are uncompressed, I can always plunge back into the various saved layers and selections I used during file creation.
My work files for JSVB for 2012 comes out to 92.5 GB of data. By comparison, an uncompressed television program in standard NTSC format takes just a hair under 2 GB of storage for random access. Put in other words, you could watch every episode of "Star Trek" from "The Man Trap" to "A Piece Of The Action" if it was stored using the same amount of hard drive space that I filled drawing for JSVB last year. Another comparison: in 2011, I backed up just below 50 GB of files, enough to get from "Man Trap" to "The Devil In The Dark".
"How can you use so much space?" a professor friend of mine once asked me, adding, "All of my work files fit on a USB stick."
"How much do you draw?" I replied. Graphics files are still far more cumbersome than text files because the binary code for text is so much more streamlined than that for pictures.
Posts
