What Happens When You Have A Terabyte Of Personal Storage?

What happens when you've got a terabyte of personal storage at your immediate and instantaneous disposal? I'm slapping together such a system not because I've got any real application, but because I want to gain some intuition on the posed question. Sure, there are some things that are pretty obvious such as "media on demand" however what about the other side of the coin? That is, rather than "playback on demand", you get "record on demand".

"Record on demand" looks to me like a richer form of bookmarking. Now I've yet to figure out an effective way to manage my bookmarks, it's a complete mess for me, furthemore I haven't found the tools out there to be of any much help. What I need though isn't really "record on demand" but rather "recall on demand", Google seems to do a pretty pleasant job at replacing my need to bookmark. So , maybe that's just it, dumb storage is just too painful to manage, you need some self-managing self-indexing personal application of your own.

A couple of folks have lent their thoughts on the matter. J. Bradford DeLong says:

Overwhelmingly cheap storage means that we will save copies of everything. But saved copies of everything are useful only when you can find what you are looking for. I already find it much, much easier to locate things on the publicly accessible part of my hard disk that is www.j-bradford-delong.net than in my private directories. Why? Google.

Dan Ozrech reports:

So the technology of capturing data is improving rapidly, and the number of devices that capture data is growing, and that results in rapidly growing oceans of data that are available for scientific and commercial analysis.

Both authors observe that the growth of data capacity is moving even faster than Moore's law. I haven't really thought about the consequences of this yet, but, I'm making my little investment to force me to live it and therefore ultimately think about it!