I have about 800GB of storage on my desk right now*. I’m consolidating two older external drives. I have so much data built up on these drives that I can’t be bothered to purge or trim any of it. I’m just copying all of it because I now have more space than I need. A lot of the data is redundant from various ad hoc backups while reinstalling Windows or moving to a new laptop.
With all this data building up, it makes me wonder what I am ever going to do with it. In some ways I am a digital pack rat, just storing things in case I need them again. But the volume of data has gotten to the point where it is too much effort to sort through it. It’s easy to spend $100 every couple of years to quadruple my storage capacity and just keep on cruising.
Similarly, I am an email pack rat. I keep a lot of stuff, especially the mail I send. A lot of it has minimal future value. Really important stuff I archive into PST files anyway. I just switched email providers and in the process I did some purging, which was a surprisingly therapeutic experience. I cut my 470MB mailbox down to 250MB. I have been on a two-year quest to achieve Inbox Zero. When I started, my inbox held about 1500 messages on average. Today I have 25 messages waiting. I have been down to 7 messages. I haven’t gotten down to zero yet. 
I will soon.
The lingering question on my brain is how are we going to deal with all this data that we are generating at a personal and family level? Is my generation’s version of the trunk in the attic going to be not just overwhelming but impossible to sort through?
* I recently picked up a 500GB external LaCie drive from Futureshop for $119 – sweet deal