Digital Storage Quotes

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

While most of the world's information is beginning to be stored electronically, most of the world's expertise still resides in books.

The belief is more and more as we use iCloud services for documents and our photos and videos and music that perhaps the most price-conscious customers are able to live in an environment where they don't need gobs of local storage because these services are lightening the load.

Our phones don't just keep us in touch with the world; they're also diaries, confessional booths, repositories for our deepest secrets.

I remember the first time I saw a CD, a technology guy brought one to my house and said we will be able to sell millions and millions of players, and people will have to restock their record collections. It was all about money. It was all about how much money we would make, "we" being "him."

It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need.

A CD is only a snapshot of the songs at a given time.

When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.

Never tell a computer to forget it.

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

I've got tons of irreplaceable information inside the soul of this computer.

When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

Our kids will never have to remember things, because it's all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There'll be video of it on your phone.

I take photos, I used to make films, I journal incessantly, and I really value the documentation of life. Because it's almost like you are making something special by wanting to make it exist in an object - on paper or even just in the computer - making these recordings, making this music.

'The cloud' is effectively an augmentation of our brains' memories.

With Internet technology you can capture a photo, a quote, or an article, store it locally and upload it into the Net more than once, if you wish, to multiple sites. Can you imagine then forcing the search engines to somehow not index that information?

Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. For me to store my novel on, since he was right - I never back up my computer's hard drive. The sight of it - it's Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes.

In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.