from bulkmemorycards.com
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by Ralph F. Couey
It's such a tiny little thing. A piece of gray plastic about the size of my little fingernail, so small that if it were accidentally dropped into a bowl of Saimin, it would likely end up in one's stomach without any realization on the part of the consumer. But it's small size is really a testament to how technology has blown past expectations.
This thing is called a micro SD card, descended from the mini SD card, which descended from the SD card (which looks enormous now), and traces its ancestry all the way back to the old floppy disks when they were really floppy. It's capacity, helpfully printed on it's face, is 256 gb. How much is that, you ask? Well, Grasshopper, according to a Google search just done, it would hold 4.8 million printed pages.
A fair-sized book, to be sure.
When I bought my Galaxy Note 9 two years ago, I ordered this card as extra storage. The phone itself has a capacity for a terabyte. And that's 75 million printed pages. But at the time, a 1tb card was just a bit too expensive, as was the 512gb version. But despite my fixation with "way bigger is way better" with regards to data storage, this one has proved to be plenty big enough for it's assigned tasks.
I had transferred my entire iTunes library, some 1,700 songs, onto the card and then painstakingly organized them into several play lists. When I'm walking, or in the car, I can tailor my listening experience depending on my mood, whether traditional Irish, Smooth Jazz, Praise, and one I call "Sing Alongs," from which I can entertain myself as long as nobody else is within earshot. I also record my sermons, not out of ego, but rather to perform a stiff analysis of content, pacing, voice level and tone, all those things that have made me a better public speaker.
Also stored there were a host of pictures and videos, ranging from nature shots and videos, to more mundane things, like an image of my vaccination card, and the number code that identifies the keys for both the Santa Fe and the Mustang.
I have subscriptions to both VUDU and Movies Anywhere. Through those apps, I have about 160 full-length features, some of which were downloaded to the card for viewing while flying. All in all, it has been a great little piece of tech.
Until three days ago.
I was out walking when my music suddenly went silent. Puzzled, I pulled out the phone to discover that the music in that playlist had vanished, as had every tune in the track list. My music had vanished. I began a frantic search through the settings to find out what happened. When I got to the page that showed the status of the card, I was greeted with the words, "Corrupted Data."
I spent several hours trying to somehow work around this problem. As it happens, I lost access not only to the movies I had downloaded, but also to where they were stored by the websites. After all that time, I finally faced facts and took the extreme measure of reformatting the card. Corrupted or not, everything was gone.
I was overwhelmed with frustration and loss, as I realized that much of what had been on that card was irretrievably gone. Even having connected the phone to my computer's backup drive and having the data saved couldn't retrieve what I had lost.
As silly as it sounds, it was almost a death in the family -- or at least a close friend. I thought I had been careful, but not careful enough. Some of those audio recordings are simply not re-creatable. In this tech age, I just didn't think that could happen. I have backups for my backups, or so I thought. Where my phone is concerned, what I had was not enough.
There were things I could replace, for example, retrieving music was a simple case of connecting to my home computer and transferring them from iTunes back to the phone. Now, though, I have the onerous task of rebuilding my playlists. Hours and hours ahead of me. My pictures and videos, most of them anyway, get automatically uploaded to my Google account, so I was thankful that they were still there. The movies are still a problem and I have a help request in to both VUDU and Movies Anytime, but who knows when they'll get back to me.
I don't have an inventory of everything which was lost, but I'm sure over the next few weeks, I'll go looking for something and with a pang of disappointment and regret discover that it no longer exists.
I think we all realize, if we stopped to think about it long enough, just how dependent we are on these devices and the information stored therein. We don't think about it all that much, until we end up in one of those increasingly rare places with no signal. For me and my provider, T-Mobile, Diamond Head Crater is one of those places. Once I exit any of the buildings, I lose connectivity and am as cut off as if I had become Mark Watney, the stranded astronaut on Mars. It is a truly disorienting experience.
I suppose that I should learn from this, being more active in backing up my data, and trying to find something interesting to do and think about that doesn't require a phone and a signal. I should learn. But I probably won't. That phone has become my second brain, and I could no more give up that phone than a Hawai'i native could give up Spam. Which is to say, "Not on yo' life, Bruddah!"
The other half of this long, connected thought is how incredible a piece of tech this card is. I remember when we got out first computer, an Apple clone we bought from one of the TV shopping networks. I remember that it's processing speed was a turtle-like 65 mhz. It had a tiny little on-board memory, just enough to run the OS. The floppy disk, a huge 5.25-inch monster, could hold only 150 kb, or just enough for about one ten-page term paper. That was in the early 1990's. Now, I have 512 gb to hold in my hand. My home computer has a terabyte on board, plus I have a 6.5tb backup drive, and a 1tb hard drive from my last home computer. Oh yeah, there's also that 512gb thumb drive. That's amazing to think about. But more is coming.
The tech revolution is not slowing. In fact, it is accelerating. According to experts, the spinning hard drive with its complex mechanical limitations will eventually be overrun by other methods. In researching articles on this subject, I was dropped into a murky soup of terms and acronyms that meant nothing to me, things like helium, megaflash, DNA, and quantum computing, which will produce systems capable of operating in virtual real-time over any distance you might need, even interplanetary distance.
But if I went back in time to the me of 1991, after I finished with the inevitable lecture about poor choices, and showed this tiny little thing, saying that it would hold millions of pages of text, I don't think '90's me would reject that out of hand. I've always felt that there were no limits to human endeavor, that no problem would remain insoluble forever. Who knows? Maybe a hundred years from now, our computers will be in our heads, controlled and operated by our own synapses. But whatever form those technologies take in the future, one thing is a virtual certainty.
It will be, for us in this day and age, indistinguishable from magic.
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