The digital revolution is moving full speed ahead and we are trying to match pace with technology by constantly creating more content. It is a race where we the users are churning out data for technology platforms to run on.
It used to be simpler back in the old days. Felt like writing? Just pick up a diary and write. Feel like capturing a moment? Take photos on film rolls. Now, writing is all about blogging and we’re sure we don’t have to explain the click, upload and share culture.
90% of the data on the internet has been produced in the last few years
According to the stats available on the internet, every second there are more than 8,000 tweets, 2.3 million emails, 47,000 Google searches, 94,000 people watching videos on YouTube, 1,700 uploading photographs on Instagram, 1,700 Tumblr posts and 1,700 Skype calls. The amount of data used by internet traffic worldwide is an astonishing 25,000 GB per second!
Organizing and searching for relevant photos, files and data has become tougher with everyone juggling multiple accounts on different services
With this amount of data, there is a new problem: sifting through it. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep a track of your files, photos and other data. Since most of us have accounts at a million places, it’s all disjointed and if we’re looking for that specific travel photo from 2009, well good luck.
Flickr:
One answer is to be more selective about what we upload and always keep a backup of the photos we believe are important. Probably the best way to keep a backup of your photographs especially for professional photographers is to upload them on to Flickr, the most famous photography website on the net. It not only allows you to have a backup of your photographs but sharing your portfolio is also easier when you have your work on Flickr.
It’s comparatively easier to manage photographs but what about our written thoughts and memories, the numerous tweets we are sending out every day or the numerous posts that we have on Facebook, all scattered across various social media platforms?
Twitter has just recently started to index tweets so that once can search through them. But while some of our thoughts and memories residing on the internet are still around, others have vanished with websites or portals that don’t exist any longer.
Cloud Services:
So for all other files we have OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive. These cloud services are your best bet for storing your all-important files.
Dropbox:
Dropbox is an excellent cross-platform storage service which provides a benchmark for other such services in terms of features, but 2 GB of free space is very limited.
Google Drive / Google+:
Google Drive is pretty generous when it comes to free space i.e. 15 GB, coupled with Google+ auto upload feature you don’t have to worry about uploading photos from your phone as it does that automatically for you. The best thing is you can upload unlimited photos and videos as long as they are within a certain size limit. Another great feature is that once you have uploaded your photos, you can edit them online. We’d like to mention the auto-awesome feature  as it is simply amazing. Google is also ahead when it comes to arranging the photographs and tagging them automatically.
Microsoft OneDrive:
Microsoft’s OneDrive is very similar to Dropbox but gives 15 Gb of free space and it’s office integration is one feature that makes it stand out. For Apple users there is iCloud, I wouldn’t say it’s outstanding but beneficial for Apple users to back-up their devices.
Timehop and IFFFT:
On the other hand there is a not for profit organization the Internet archive (https://archive.org/) and the recently formed company Timehop (http://timehop.com/); they are mining into our digital content and giving us snapshots of what we were up to a few years back. The timehop app is available for both IOS and Android (free for both). It gives you a daily throwback of photographs from your past 1 to 5 years.
There is also the amazing IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/) service that one can use to save all our social content. You basically create what IFTTT terms a recipe with triggers for example if you Instagram a photograph then store it in Dropbox. It’s a free service and the app is free for both IOS and Android. On the other hand for blogging it’s always better to have a personal self-hosted blog.
Conclusion:
While the digital revolution gains speed with every passing day and 40% (2.9 billion internet users worldwide) of the world’s population creates and uploads memories on the internet let’s not forget that all this is not permanent and could easily vanish, remember there was 1 website in 1991 and more than 1 billion website now, so rather than suffering from Digital Amnesia let’s keep a copy of our memories and the cloud services are here to help.
