I hope everyone had a great holiday. I was reminded by a friend on Christmas Eve how lucky I am, learning that my friend had just left the hospital after being admitted for the last few days. It was a timely reminder for me that there are people in the world far worse off than me and while I might have some trials and challenges in the greater picture I’m pretty well off and have a lot to be grateful for.

This is the time of year I generally spend a couple of days doing a digital and physical cleaning, going through my disk storage and purging old junk data and then physically going through my office and storage room (unofficial lab), discarding equipment that broke in the past year or older equipment that hasn’t seen the light of day in the past 365 days.

As I mentioned in last year’s post entitled, Holiday Gadgets and Recycling, you can’t just put that old computer or TV in the trash can or by the curb in Pennsylvania these days you need to recycle them at an approved collection center in your county. This year I’ve got a Canon iP4600, Epson 3170 Photo Scanner, Sony 30″ WEGA TV, Dell 19″ CRT and Dell Dimension 8200. A few of the above broke this year and a few of them have been sitting in the storage area for 365+ days which means it’s time for them to go. This is another reason I don’t mind supporting my local Best Buy since they provide a great recycling program.

If your going to be disposing or recycling an older laptop or desktop make sure you wipe the entire hard disk to protect your privacy. I wrote a post entitled, Safely disposing of your old computer, which describes how you can safely dispose of your personal computer so there’s little to no chance that anyone could extract any useful data.

The big technical issue in the household this past year has been the explosion in storage space requirements. The oldest daughter is now working with videos, yet another YouTube star in the making, that combined with all the pictures, movies, audio streams, etc has created a huge demand for additional storage space here in the household. A side effect of that explosion has been the challenge of backing up all that data in a manner that is somewhat automated trying to avoid the human element (me) that occasionally fails. So I added a Seagate Barracuda 3TB SATA hard drive to use in my external eSATA hard drive dock, replacing the existing 2TB hard drive. This was a relatively cheap option and will allow me to continue doing business as usual until I can come up with some other options. I did look briefly at the Synology Diskstation 415+ but I decided to table that potential purchase until later in the year.

I know quite a few folks are using Synology, Drobo and even FreeNAS. I briefly played with FreeNAS but the older hardware I was using just didn’t have the performance I was looking for. I’ll probably seriously look at purchasing a Synology later in the year, we need to see what the budget can afford.

Cheers!

Image Credit: jaylopez