Planned Obsolescence

I try to be good; I try to make multiple backups. What I hate most is that knawing feeling that you hope that at the end of the day, what you just did was completely pointless. You don't want to use them. You want to look at your backup media in 10 years and think "Huh. Oh yeah. I guess I can toss that now."

But we're in that weird phase of technology where it's more of a pain in the ass than it used to be. Documents are easy. You can have duplicates all over God and creation: a key drive (or two or three of four), on CD, Mozy, Amazon S3, whatever. Music and video are another matter. Currently, I have nearly 100 GB of fairly well-organized music. A little too large to store easily in a cloud, whether something like Amazon S3 or whatever the hell Windows Live Mesh will turn out to be. External drive? Sure, they're already there. But still, that's storage, not backup. And I don't want a freakin' RAID array in the house, because it strikes me as yet another soon-to-be-archaic technological solution, like having my own butter churner. Even a standalone external hard drive strikes me as something that five years from now, will seem just... stupid... "so, grandpa, when you were younger you actually had spinning discs of crash prone magnetic media in a powered box on your desk? Wow. "

I know, the cloud's coming. But okay, we're not there yet.  The pipes aren't fat enough, the storage isn't quite cheap enough just yet. So I occasionally have a day where I'm mentally too toasted for creative stuff and just go on autopilot through some low-priority to-do items like "create backups of music" but even just burning the DVDs and labeling them, I'm thinking ewww, how archaic. I know I'm going to look at this disc in seven years, the way right now I look at a disc marked "5/1/2001 various documents, emails etc" and wish I could have gotten that part of my life back.