Anyone who really needs to be reminded of the importance of data storage has either just been introduced to the computer for the first time, or has been living in an alternate reality, perhaps in the past even, for the last 10 years. These days, data is everything - money, information, the lot. Everything we ever do, or say, or want, or own, is reducible in the final analysis to bits and bytes flowing down fibre optic cables, to algorithms nestling in the labyrinthine RAM of servers that can hold more information than every book ever written. We've had the Iron Age; the Stone Age; the Bronze Age; the Steam Age: this is the Data Age. That's how important data is. The importance of data storage is no less than the importance of protecting our way of life. Of making sure that the things we do and the things we build don't suddenly stop happening.

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Here's an example. All money in the world is now represented by data in the computer systems of banks. Destroy that data and there is no money left. It has all been zapped out of existence. Economies (not 우리카지노 that they're that great anyway, but this would be far worse) cease to do what they are supposed to. Everything falls apart. Why? Because some ones and zeroes in a server somewhere got wiped off a rapidly rotating magnetic disk.

We're not talking so much about the importance of data storage here as the importance of safe data storage. There's clearly a difference - like keeping your diamonds in a bird bath in the front garden, as opposed to locking them in a safe inside a locked room in a reinforced cellar under your house. The second option is clearly the ideal alternative: that's what everyone strives for with their own data storage, though not all that many people or even companies are able to achieve it. That's because data itself is pretty easy to find, if you know what you are doing - hackers, for example, can send their nasty little worms running all over the electronic ether and before anyone knows where they are their personal data has been stolen and is being used to finance some extremely costly shenanigans on the other side of the world.

So - the importance of data storage, safe data storage, is obvious. If a company loses data, it either loses its own identity or it loses its ability to trade until the mess has been sorted out. Neither option is good. How, though, can one store data in a safe fashion?

One of the best ways to get safe data storage is to have an outside company, like UK based data storage experts Data Barracks (they even operate from a demilitarised bunker, just to reinforce their point), do it for you. Companies like Data Barracks don't just recognise the importance of data storage - they are able to physically duplicate entire data bases, whole companies effectively, and store those "copies" in secure servers that can't be hacked into and don't even get affected by power shortages. In a world where data literally is the world, that seems like a pretty sensible precaution to take. Store data safely - or die.

I have spent years operating computers. Going back to the mid seventies I was involved with then the simplest form of computers in which data entry was the skill of the day!

It was nothing but a card filled with tiny rectangles that represented machine language numbers. The industry then morphed into what amounted to nothing more than a keyboard without a monitor. Everything was entered manually through the keyboard and printed out through a dot-matrix printer.

Literally thousands of printed pages formally known as 'computer only paper' ran through the printer and that was our earliest form of a monitor. Usually the best computer keyboards i.e., 'terminals' were locate at college universities where one room housed dozens of terminals and there was a separate room for a monstrous computer that was linked to all terminals.

Yes only 30 short years ago what was housed in a megalithic system filling an entire room from top to bottom had the get up and go power of less then one small file amidst tens of thousands of files of one of our software programs that operate now.

Yes this industry has leaped technologically beyond all imagination. Even 15 years ago, a computer having 250K of memory was considered massive. Remember the Commodore 64. This represented 64 kilobytes of memory or 64,000 bytes.

Today this would be considered a joke.

From that time not so long ago, the memory began to increase. 64 turned into 128, then 256, then 512 and then we entered the day of 1MB of memory. This seemed unbelievable, who could have ever dreamed that a computer could house this much memory potential?

It did not end there, in fact not even close. We then entered the 2MB then 4MB then 8MB and this led to our first real good connection to the internet. However due to the popularity of this new advancement called the World Wide Web, 8MB simply became ineffective

We then added higher processor speeds in our new toys and then finally 16MB of Random access memory became the techno dream.

Do you realize this was only 11 short years ago when 16 megabytes of memory was the most powerful ram speed in computers, at least non-military computers.

You would have thought that we busted through the apex of this science and we simply could not go any further. From 1975 to 1995 we went from a gigantic computer that only scratched the surface of random access memory, to a small machine that could handle a hard drive and additional memory to run programs that had excess of 16 million bytes of memory.

But from 1995 - 2006 we leaped into a whole new era of this science. From 16MB in 1995 we have now developed technology that allows even smaller computers to carry more than 2 billion bytes of Random Access Memory. That is 2GiGaBytes!

Today we are mesmerized by faster processing units and specialty software, yet few still understand the real importance of extra memory called Random Access Memory. At a future date I want to explain why this extra memory or lack thereof is the key to a smooth running machine.

You give me more RAM along with a solid hard drive and my computer will continue to operate effectively with advanced technology long after it will be deemed a dinosaur. RAM is the energy life blood of computer operations. Without it you just have another slow moving super computer!