A few years back I installed an additional hard drive on our computer. A bit later I switched to a newer operating system. I promised myself back then that I'd soon get around to throwing off the old operating system and quite a number of programs that wouldn't run on the new system. That "soon" is still waiting to happen. What was the rush, I asked myself. Hadn't I just installed a new and very large hard drive? Didn't I have lots of space to fill even without throwing out the old stuff? And certainly not least, didn't I have more important, pressing and interesting things to do instead of taking a few hours to clean up that hard drive? Of course I did.

Since then that new, and very large, hard drive has been filling up. Two and a half years ago I wrote about this situation, noting that as our hard drive capacities continue to grow, the items we want to save multiply in order to fill that space. On my 3MP per inch digital camera, a raw photograph usually takes up around 650K. Raw photographs from newer digital cameras, with 5MP per inch take up about 1.2MB. This of course suggests that if we don't edit our photos, and throw some out, or burn them to CD in order to get them off our hard drives, even a 120GB hard drive can fill up very quickly. So I had to do something about that situation.

The obvious solution was an additional computer in the family - with a still larger capacity hard drive. And that means that although some of our hard drives are close to being full, there's still one very large one which still has lots of space - so I can still delay cleaning up and throwing stuff out.