I have been collecting information all of my life. I never expected to be able to access any portion of all of it until two major things happened:
* The manufacture of low-cost image scanners, image capture devices along with a useful program for capture and OCRing of scans which allow what I call PaperPorting.
* The creation of an indexing program which can do to my local system what has been done to the internet by Google and other such providers. It is known as the SearchDesktop.

Here is an example of what is displayed in a search for "Ward Cunningham" on the part of my system which I have invoked indexing on (over 1200 documents were found), of which one was selected for display:

http://donaldr.noyes.com/WikiTest/Search.jpg

In a subsequent search for "debugging", the engine found over 8 thousand documents in about 40 seconds.

It finds files in which the search term is present in the file name or within the text, and for images within the folder of the image.

It discovers the content regardless of the form of the containing document, whether text, doc file, spreadsheet, database, or whatever, and displays the content in a window pane on the right-hand side.

Eventually, I will be able to find information I want which exists in my soon to be realized M''''''ultiTeraByteInformationStore of several million files and documents, and do so in just a few minutes.

My collection continues, awaiting new and exciting developments which will allow even more accessibility. -- DonaldNoyes.20090331.0739

Development aiding collections: The acquisition of a 1.5Tb Usb Hard Drive. My aim before the end of 2010 involves the securing of personal local storage exceeding Ten Terabytes. (20100406 - By June, I expect to be at Five Terabytes, by December I should have the System_Primary at Ten Terabytes or beyond and my System_ReducedFootprint at about Three Terabytes. *Done_20100810 3.6Tb)

I'll make another upward scaling to Twentyfive Terabytes by 2012

It only proves the truth of what I said to someone in 1979 when I bought a TRS-80, who wondered why, asking me: What will you use/need a computer for? And I responded "Everything!"

OrToPutItAnotherWay ...

''I wonder if such personal data stores will soon become obsolete, in favour of cloud-based private and public information repositories.''

I don't think so. There will always be those who trust what they can control and which costs them next to nothing. The thing about clouds is that they are controlled by the weather. A personal information store is somewhat sheltered and weather resistant. I believe what will emerge will be that people will look to clouds for that which everyone seems to be interested in and will look to the personal store for those things which are personal and semi-private. I don't like the word obsolete and use instead the word "abandoned", or "superseded" as more representative of what really happens to old technologies. A 6 Gigabyte Hard drive which is in one of your old computers is just that. We abandon what still works in favor of something that works better. I much prefer the larger storage devices and the more flexible and smaller sized and convenient things. A flash drive holding 16 gigabytes of information in a device not much bigger than part of my little finger and pluggable, is much preferred to a larger, slower and device dependent 100 or 250 Mb Zip Disk. I have thousands of disks of various sizes which have upon them information, much like an old book in a library, which is on the shelf and has been for decades. As such, I consider them to be references and I retain the devices necessary to access them. They are for the most part abandoned, in this case to storage containers. From time to time, I go through some of them and make the information on them more available by copying them to more modern storage media.

You can be sure that Cloud-based systems which are easily and freely accessible will be utilized widely and will prove to be reliable and conveniently available and much used. But some day, they too will take their place in the virtual library shelves of less-used resources in favor of something better.

If you have the GoogleDesktop installed on your computer, in addition to the SearchDesktop mentioned above, you will find you have access to the search and summarize capabilities of Google with the search target being that of your own computer. This may be included by some as part of the "Cloud" computing system, but it enjoys the protection of being documents and data resources which you personally control. That means that documents containing a search string, for example "freely accessible" as in this wiki page, which I will now save to the 1.5Tb drive will become available if not almost immediately, at least by the next time I start my computer. (I don't know this for sure, as I haven't tried it. I will try it using windows xp after posting and saving this edit.)
-- DonaldNoyes.20100215

[I suspect that personal data storage of sorts would exist even on a cloud (using technologies akin to Tahoe); that is, individuals will almost certainly construct databases and searchable registries of data that they simply don't share. Personal devices will still keep cached copies of data important to them, such that we can use it even while disconnected from the network; i.e. personal storage devices will be participants in the cloud with considerations for disruption tolerance. But I don't buy into the idea that 'pile-of-disks' personal storage is very useful; data is only useful to the degree that it may be used to provide a service and integrate with other systems; a pile of disks forces a 'person' to be party to these processes and services, which is quite inefficient, has terrible accessibility, is not very survivable (i.e. the pile of disks can be destroyed by fire or flood, and is subject to obsolescence or degradation of physical media, and is not accessible to upgrade processes so is also subject to obsolescence of software), and offers no security advantages relative to StateOfTheArt secure distributed systems. A major advantage of a cloud is that it can also manage ''process'' - maintenance, integration, sharing, distribution of data and services and applications and even of market. But security is still a sticking point; while secure FileSystem''''''s like Tahoe are basically immune to regulation or corruption or failure by any given government or organization (due to automatic redundancy and distribution and secure file-splitting), more work is needed to support secure maintenance, integration, distribution, and sharing of processes and services.]

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