If you only had one HDD, what data would you keep?

Think of it as a digital age equivalent to the what would you take with you to a deserted island. The capacity doesn't matter, because I'm sure most of us would still have to leave behind a lot of data even with the largest capacity HDDs on the market.

Personally, I'd probably keep most of the photos and videos I've captured over the years as well as essential software and project data. To maximize the experience, I would top it off with emulators with small foot prints and retro games that take up little space.

 

I'd keep a Wikipedia dump so I can look up how to not die to some minor sh-t any caveman would've known how to deal with, and might even find out when the next ship/flight/satellite/whatever will pass by so I can get the eff off the island. Other than that, I might actually welcome the chance to un-digitize my life.

 

Use sand and rocks and smelt them in volcanoes
Makes silicon, glass, and iron
Find copper
Make Iphone 8.

 

Only one HDD? Could I have this one?

http://www.serversupply.com/product...p?pid=276332&gclid=CPmNxoz4nM8CFUMvgQodD0sA1w

 

Something in the TB range which isn't uncommon these days can hold a lot of data. Which is basically all my data so this isn't a challenge for me at all.

 

You're a lucky fellow. My TV show/broadcast archive alone would blast past hundreds of TB.

 

Guess what, you can be so lucky too: All you have to do is delete some stuff!
Personally I really don't see the point in keeping anything that I could easily redownload. No use having the n-thousandth dead storage mirror of e.g. House of Cards, not to mention most of it only gets watched once anyways.

Though I am interested in how you manage all that data. Lots of USB drives? Big file server? Multiple servers? How do you catalogue everything?

 

I would get a few TB drive and store my music and photo's mainly. Just personal stuff, then i would have the rest of my data. Like game files and system recoveries.

 

I can fit all the data from all my computers probably on a 500GB drive.

 

True, but that would go against my archivist nature.
Much of the digitized broadcasts I have may very well be one of a kind. Pretty much any movie, TV show, news report and whatnot that I find interesting from 1979 - now is in that archive. But yeah, tons of external HDDs, flash drives and a few of my old desktop towers have been converted to file servers. For cold storage, I'm using DVD-R (4.7GB) and BD-R.

 

What about this 60tb solid state

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/

 

Heh, nice one. And while you're busy totally ignoring the basic idea of this exercise, make your definition of "HDD" also cover those external drive enclosures that actually contain multiple (usually 2, sometimes even 3) disks. That should last you a while.

 

Darn, I went off rails and ventured into what I actually do instead of using one HDD. lol
But I did state what I'd do in a crunch. It would pain me to leave everything else behind though.

 

Usually once i watch something, i never watch it again

 

This has to be the best answer! If it was a desert Island situation, I would probably want a Wikipedia dump too, is a 960gb Flash modded iPod 7th gen a HDD? If so I would go for that with the Wikipod mod installed, enough survival books (in the old iPod book format obviously) and a few thousand of my favorite novels to see me through whatever happened to put me in that situation, and some lets plays of my favorite 16/32bit games. This is assuming I have a decent power supply (Genny based, but where am I getting the fuel from?) And also that I don't go blind within a year from reading from the old 320x240 iPod screen.

Otherwise, text2speech convert the whole of Wikipedia? guess 960gb would not even be close to carrying that though Would probably end up with 00-Anime filling up more than 960 haha and all I'd want is decent information, but we all know the Anime sections of Wikipedia are almost as bloated as the Sonic pages.

edit: Yeah I could go iPod touch or iPhone or Android, but that's cheating even more than having an iPod in my mind. Plus I'd rather have 7 day battery than 7 hours haha and as far as I know you can't mod any of those with a 960GB flash or a better than 14 hour battery

 

Everything I have wouldn't even take 1 HDD

 

All my porn.

 

The entirety of the internet on a series of 3 1/2 floppy disks (Mac formatted).

 

At least one of us is honest here.

 

10Tb of porn?