When I was in sixth grade, I was addicted to reading the Guiness Book of World Records. The record that has stuck with me the most is the one about the fattest man in the world who was buried in a piano box. Appropriately, the image of this man returned to me as I was organizing some of my enormous video files.
Several years ago, it seemed like Iomega’s Zip drives were the solution to the data-exchange problem. You don’t want to send your 90M-byte video file as an attached file over the Net, unless you either (a) have a fast connection no one else has even heard of, or (b) really want to antagonize the recipient. There are also some compatibility problems with Zip drives.
Why didn’t Iomega make its PC and Mac units interoperable? Usenet is full of complaints about the drives’ long-term reliability. But those with working Zip drives report that it’s an easy way to share large files and collections of them like Quark files or small- and medium-size Web sites.
How greedy we get, though, and how hungry, as our hard disks begin to resemble the torso of the fattest man in the world. Iomega and its competitors responded by coming up with a new drive (Iomega’s is called Jaz) that could transfer one-gigabyte files: I know someone who loves This Is Spinal Tap so much that he gives a 616M-byte digitized version of the film to everyone he knows with a Jaz drive. But Jaz drives are essentially the same as tape drives, a format that is notoriously cranky when it comes to transferring tapes from one machine to another.
Many of the files too large to fit on Zip drives are indeed useful: only L.L. Bean’s competitors and people who hate junk mail would claim that its massive customer database isn’t a worthwhile file worth backing up, managing, and distributing throughout the company’s internal network. But so many of the enormous, too-big-for-Zip files now clogging the Net (with nonsense like South Park episodes and full-blown film parodies) are just big, fat versions of the gang emails we all received when email was young.
Next time you share a big file for amusement, ask yourself, “Is it worth it?” If your answer is still yes, you might want to have your hard drive fitted for a piano-box casket.
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Have you outgrown your Zip drive? We want to know. Please don’t send any digitized South Park episodes to prove your point.
