Back it up

Let's review some web history:

- First there was the online access battle - AOL, Netzero, Compuserve, etc.

- Then there was the email battle - Rocketmail, Hotmail, Juno and Gmail.

- There was the advertising battle - Doubleclick, Adsense and ValueClick.

- Search was (and still is) a BIG battle - Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, LiveSearch and of course Google.

A coming battle I see on the horizon is in the area of storage. The amount of digital assets we have has exploded over the last few years. As our hard drives fill up with mp3s, photos, movies and important documents, how are we going to back all of this data up? The days of copying things to a few CDs is long gone.

External hard-drives are becoming cheaper and easier to use. Sites and services like Mozy, Amazon (S3) and the long-rumored gDrive provide virtual backup space. Backing up your files online is a nice idea since something like a fire could take out both your main hard drive and your external backup.

Data storage is not sexy like search or fun like email. But it is something everyone should be doing.