Everyone knows that the computer world is a fast changing one. Programmers have to stay up to date with the lastest technologies to keep going and inovating. One of those concepts that is slowly evolving is the concept of deleting.
In the early days of computing, deleting something meant to permanently remove something from existence. It was somewhat related to the fact that computers had limited memory and storage space. Nowadays, deleting can mean one of the following things:
- Move to the trash folder
- Remove from the current view
- Remove the table of content entry
- Make invisible
- Make not available
- Archive
- Protect my privacy
- Prepare for long-term backup
- Encrypt for my own use only
- Free space
With the advent of cheap storage and the proliferation of backup software like the Time Machine, why anyone would want to delete something that might be precious? The only reasons I could think of is to protect someone’s privacy or because you have already used all your cheap storage space and you are too lazy or too poor to buy some more and you need some free space.
What happens when there is little to no use to permanently delete things? You keep them. You might want to archive them somewhere, but you keep them forever. You keep everything even if you think there is nothing you will ever do with those data, you keep them in case there might be something new to do with it in the future. You keep them to have a trace of what you did in the past.
This is exactly what is happening in different areas. Take the well known web-based email provider Gmail for instance. They are freely offering about 6 GB of storage space and they keep increasing it everyday. With that amount of space, you don’t need to delete your old emails. You will probably never need to do it and this is precisely what Google wants. Your old emails are worth money for them because they display ads next to them.
This is how you need to see it. Whatever is it, data is most likely worth more than its storage cost.
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