People don't have all their digital storage anymore
Yesterday, I used the gallery feature for the first time in Substack to embed a collection of 9 photos from Rocky Mountain National Park. This is probably not going to become a photograph Substack. All my photos were originally taken in a RAW format that was larger than what Substack allowed. I had to downsize them to use the gallery feature. I’m probably going to have to figure out how I want to back up video and picture content using something external to my MacBook Air. The internal drive on this MacBook Air is just one terabyte, and that is not enough room for a ton of 4K video content. That type of video just chews up hard drive space. I recorded a podcast for the first time in a while this morning. It will go out tonight, and the audio version really does not take up that much space; it was just a few megabytes. Recording that same thing in 4K video would take up gigabytes instead of megabytes. Over the last few years, I have used those nifty orange LaCie rugged external hard drives to store the 4K video that has been shared to YouTube. That method has worked out well enough, but it is probably not a sustainable method.
It’s true that people don't have all their digital storage anymore. A lot of it is just abandoned on cloud services. Slowly decaying in Blu-ray or already decayed in DVD format. The amount of just glacially cold digital storage is probably absolutely out of control by now. However, I think the people who edit and work with large video files have to use different methods to handle such large amounts of data. Some of them use some pretty complex NAS systems. A few of those are cloud-enabled and allow people to work on and share files remotely. I always find that to be interesting given the size of some of those video files in gigabytes. That is a problem I’ll dig into later. I have enough storage for tons of video projects at this point. Some people probably just assume that YouTube will exist forever and it is a surprisingly vast video storage platform.
People probably mostly just store their photos within either Google Photos or the iCloud system. Either of those work well enough and can store thousands upon thousands of photos. You can’t really store fast amounts of 4K video on either of those clouds you will just end up filling the capacity. That would require buying more storage and then just paying for that on an ongoing basis. I found it easier to just store data on an external drive and move along without a definitive backup system. That is not a solid long term plan.