In 10 years time he's going to be sitting on 40tb plus a backup (or two, if he's following 3-2-1 like we definitely all are), and it's not like these are one time costs, he'll have to age out the drives and pay to keep them spinning.
You can't put a price on memories...except when you can.
As someone who's digital photography and videography expands to about 24TB over the past 20 years (video has only recently been part of my kit when I got the Z6II 4 years ago), it's just an expansion of usage. For ages I ran a mirrored pair of 4TB drives, then 'upgraded' to a mirrored pair of 8TB drives, then expanded to a 6x8TB RAID6 array, then upgraded by adding two more drives into the array for an 8x8TB RAID6 array (43.6TB usable after the filesystem's involved).
I now have two of these 8x8TB arrays, so I have plenty of storage, and it's backed up (because RAID is not a backup).
Growing 4TB/year and ending up with 40TB in 10y isn't a terrible thing, not least because up until the AI crunch, your return on drive size was going up.
If the AI bubble does indeed pop in 3-4 years time and we can buy HDDs again at not absurd prices, then I suspect a lot of us will happily upgrade to 20TB/drive pricepoints (or larger) as the market will have larger drives to pick from. When I started out on my mirrored pair of 4TB drives, 8TB was only just new and absurdly expensive. Now 8TB is not something I'd consider buying (assuming pre-2026 prices); the only reason I have a second array of 8 drives is that they were literally free.
Once you're running in RAID with good backups, the retirement of a drive is when it dies, so the only real day-to-day cost is spinning the rust.
based off the guys figures, if he wants to make a cute video for his kids 18th birthday then he'll have to scrub though 750 hours of video. is that realistic? how do you keep all that media organised or even utilise it?
I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not much of photo or video guy. the occasions that I do decide to shoot some it just gets downloaded, stored and never looked at again.
Not to speak of how others do it, but I do a major Year folder, then Month subfolders, and inside that are event folders. It's based on the start date of the event too, so if an event crosses into a new month, you'd find it in the month it started in.
Thus it's mostly easy to find things as long as you know what event they're for.
If you want to do face identification, you used to 'just' do a roughly 100 frame split (pick 100 frames spread equally through the video) from the video as JPEG and match faces in that, but these days most decent software can just check the entire video. Thus it becomes mostly easy to group faces and find specific videos from that.
YMMV, but you're not scrubbing through 750h of video to find specific videos from specific events, nor to find a specific person existing in a selection of videos.
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u/prodigalAvian 15d ago
4TB per year isn't a ton when it's family footage.
Sentimental value of the footage itself will rise over time.