Please, ma’am, I want some more. A terabyte should do it.

The Gazette’s system support specialist, Louise Pearson, spins around in her chair.

“Why do you need that much space?”

I stutter, because no one’s ever asked me this question. “Well, you know, work stuff and photos and videos and … emails.”

“When’s the last time you cleaned out your inbox?”

Just like that, I’m busted:

My name is Stephanie and I’m a digital hoarder.

If technology plays a significant role in your life, and you haven’t developed maintenance habits to keep things in check, you might be one too. According to statistics compiled by Trend Micro, a global software security company, many of us live on the iceberg’s tip of our digital data load. While a little more than half of respondents on one survey claimed all the items on their computers were irreplaceable, they admitted to using or revisiting only about 20 percent of that data on a regular basis. The typical iTunes user has about 3,000 songs in her library, but listens to fewer than 250 daily; her phone has 65 apps, 15 of which she actively uses.

Me? Try five (of 80) apps and a handful of playlists, on heavy rotation. The bulk of my irreplaceable data – tens of thousands of photo and music files, multiple abandoned novels, decades of grainy videos and notes – is convalescing on a half-dozen antiquated laptops, on a shelf under some hats. I think.

“There’s a difference between digital hoarding and digital clutter,” said Terrance Boult, El Pomar Endowed Chair of Innovation and Security and professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “If you’re talking about keeping all the photos of you and your family that are digitized, that’s not hoarding, especially with the number of photos we’ve taken now, with our phones. If you’re talking about holding onto laptops with data on them that’s really difficult to retrieve…?”

Well, you might have a problem.

Secret shame

It’s estimated that a gigabyte worth of data, if printed, would fill the back of a pickup, and most of us maintain at least 250 gigabytes of storage. Thanks to technology, we can park that fleet on cinder blocks on our virtual lawns, with no fear of reprisal. The neighbors won’t complain and we won’t get a fine from the city. Heck, no one even needs to know.

“Digital hoarding, it’s really the same thing as physical hoarding – accumulating beyond the point of usefulness – only it’s invisible. Junk expands to fill the space available plus one room, or plus one gigabyte,” said Deniece Schofield, a California-based organizing expert, author and speaker. “I’ve had people tell me they cannot delete one email. I had a lady the other day asking, ‘How do I organize the 11,000 photos on my computer?'”

Today, people with a bent toward collecting (or who, like me, suffer from an acute form of purge aversion) aren’t constrained by physical boundaries; we’re enabled by data compression, external storage and the cloud. That space, and the options for populating it, will only get cheaper and bigger.

How big, exactly?

“There’s nobody walking around today that can give you an accurate assessment of that,” said Jim Morand, an Arizona-based owner of Sterling Data Solutions who answered the phone for the local branch of the store when I called. “How much data have you accumulated? Ten years ago, I bet you didn’t have 10 gigabytes.”

Those early quarters seem laughably modest today.

“I remember when I thought I was all hot-to-trot setting up a one-gig office for 20 people,” said Tom Hutton, the communications and media relations chief at UCCS.

Expanding universe

Keep in mind that we’ve only had a chronological blip so far in which to collect, and the digital universe is on track to at least double in size every two years.

In 1999, the volume of digital information produced globally was between two and three exabytes, according to a study produced by University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information. A report last year by global information management company EMC projected that by 2020, the data dimension will have expanded from its 2012 total of 2,837 exabytes, or a billion gigabytes, to 40,000 exabytes. That translates to about 5,200 gigabytes per person.

“All the data that’s been created since we started collecting, it doesn’t equal what we’ll create in the next two years. It’s very intimidating,” said Morand, whose company helps individuals and businesses manage data.

Anticipated future storage needs for “big data” such as video files recorded by police body cameras, “you’re talking about multiple petabytes of data on just that one item,” said Morand, referring to the voluminous, million-gigabyte storage unit. “Can we store it all? Yes, we can. We’re getting better at it and we’re getting better equipment to put it on, so yeah we’ll find a way to do it.”

But, as individual “netizens,” do we need all that room?

The average inbox contains about 8,000 messages, with plenty of space to grow. Yahoo gives users of its free email service a terabyte of free cloud storage. Subscribers to Amazon’s Prime program receive free unlimited storage for certain digital items, such as photos. The free 30 gigabytes alloted through my Google work account started to feel cramped, for me, at around email 62,000. That’s when Google let me know I was maxing out and could take the time to clean and organize – or, for a mere $2 a month, I could lease a 100 gig mansion in the cloud and put the whole thing off a few more years.

Cheap storage, high price?

When unlimited, affordable, eternal storage is a real option, decluttering is easy enough to avoid – forever, if one is so inclined.

“It comes down to a personal choice of time versus money,” Boult said. “As storage continues to get cheaper, and you can buy terabyte after terabyte, it’s easier to just buy more storage … and you can keep a lot of that stuff around because some of that might someday be useful, and your records are easily searchable.”

Schofield thinks procrastinating digital organization is a bad decision on multiple fronts, and risks growing a clutterer into something far more psychologically caustic.

“Buying more gigabytes or terabytes does not solve the problem. Most people are clutterers and not hoarders, and will physically put things here for now and put them away later … but putting them off until later just causes them to pile up and then you get overwhelmed and it feeds procrastination,” she said. “Digital hoarding slows down your brain and your system. All your systems.”

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Contact Stephanie Earls: 636-0364