As a father of a young baby, the shelter in place mandate due to COVID-19 has been a blessing with challenges. It has been great to spend so much time with my daughter, to see her grow every day, and to be such a big part of her life so early. This has been like an extended paternal leave. However, working around a young baby’s schedule is no easy feat. Playtime followed by naptime rules our days and evenings. We are cognizant of her schedule every waking moment of the day. I try to carefully orchestrate my online meeting schedule in order to not disturb her napping hours. Of course, this is impossible, but I am trying my best – so is my wife. Together we tag-team our schedules, and try to spend as much time with her as possible.
Despite the limitations of going out to public places due to COVID-19, I have been taking just as many, if not more, pictures of my daughter. My phone is constantly on “camera” mode, and my photo library has grown exponentially in the last 4 months. Combine that with my wife’s photos, our photo library is ballooned many gigabytes since mid-March.
Since mostly everyone is sheltering in place and not traveling or meeting family/friends, social media has been the best medium to keep in contact and current. I have been uploading (maybe too many) my daughter’s pictures on various social media outlets, so that my family and relatives can see my daughter growing up. It is hard to imagine how my parents lived in the non-digital age. They had to take physical pictures, develop them, and then mail them to family and friends. That was a weeks if not month project. It was also costly and time consuming. For me, it is practically free and only takes a couple clicks on my phone or PC and everyone is up to date.
With our photo library growing so quickly, I have nightmares about losing our pictures, so I have been more diligent about backing up my smartphone and PC. On a regular schedule, I back up both devices to the (public) cloud, which is managed by one of the big data center companies. Since my wife and I cannot be the only parents taking this shutdown opportunity to spend more quality time with their children, taking pictures, and uploading them on various social media sites and the cloud, this is part of the reason behind the solid growth of data center type HDDs, specifically nearline HDDs. According to TRENDFOCUS, nearline HDD exabytes shipped has been on a solid upward trend ¹, and with Toshiba’s solid nearline HDD offerings such as the market’s “sweet spot” 14TB* MG07 Enterprise Capacity HDD Series, Toshiba’s Y-Y exabyte shipped percentage is growing faster than the market since 2019.
There is an old adage about children eventually growing up to be like their parents. Of course, when I was younger, I never thought that to be true, but now that I am older and with a family, I can see more and more of my father in me than ever before. So, even though I have a back-up in the (public) cloud, I feel more at ease knowing that I have a physical copy backed up on my 4TB Toshiba Canvio® Portable External Hard Drive – my private cloud. As I see my daughter growing up so quickly, I am cherishing all of our moments and memories together. For pennies per gigabyte, the 4TB Toshiba Canvio Portable External Hard Drive is the perfect back-up solution for all of moments with our daughter.
I know with all of the efforts to find a vaccine for COVID-19, it is only a matter of time before we will be able to resume our “normal” lives; however, until then, I will take full advantage of this shelter in place moment and cherish my time with my family. I hope everyone and their respective families are also safe and well.
¹Source: TRENDFOCUS, Inc.
CANVIO is a registered trademark of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. in the United States and Latin America.
*Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.