When will broadband finally kill local storage?

A software upgrade from Buffalo Tech for some odd reason nuked one of their network drives and out went my backups. Another Western Digital back-up drive died on the spur of the moment, without explanation.

Cloud location relatively easily

My 100 Mbps broadband connection without any caps means I now back up all my computer’s drive to a cloud location relatively easily. The Apple TimeCapusle  has now been reduced to a WiFi router and a switch. This is very different from my life as recently as 2009 when the 128 GB SSD on an Air wasn’t enough.

Today, there is very little need for me to have any in-home storage. My documents live in Dropbox and Google Office. My photos get backed up to iCloud. Radio comes from Pandora. On-demand music comes from Spotify. Movies come from Netflix. TV comes from Hulu. The home phone is Skype. And for everything else, there’s Amazon. The lesson of the story? If you have a fast enough broadband connection, you don’t need hard drives.

This broadband-enabled change is going to have an impact, and we’ll discuss some of this with Drew Houston, CEO and Co-Founder of DropBox and Silicon Valley legend Andy Bechtolsheim at our inaugural GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco on November 10.