Digital hoarding not dangerous, but a nuisance

External hard drives sold at places like Best Buy and Costco can store up to 5 terabytes of data.

Huge servers in the commercial world are the bedrock of online banking and shopping, and massive online databases let you search for flights and hotels, enjoy music videos on YouTube and watch movies on Netflix.

Unfortunately, excessive storage also has led to digital hoarding, a condition indicated by having thousands of photos that you seldom if ever look at scattered around the hard drive of your computer, and thousands of unread e-mails languishing in your inbox.

More importantly, you can search a hard drive for most items with a few keystrokes, an easier proposition than combing through boxes, shelves and drawers.

What’s more, digital hoarding on home computers is declining, thanks to streaming music and online storage services, which eliminate the need to keep — and back up — documents and photos on a computer.

[...] storage services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud and Dropbox discourage hoarding by limiting the amount of data you can store for free.

Most smartphones let you automatically upload every photo you take to the cloud — and that can add up to a lot of take-and-forget snapshots eating up your free storage space.

The Apple Watch has a brighter display than the Pebble Time, along with several features missing in the latter, including haptic feedback (it taps your wrist for alerts), a speaker that lets you conduct brief phone calls, a built-in heart rate monitor, and the ability to use Apple Pay.

The Pebble Time boasts better battery life (seven days vs. 18 hours for the Apple Watch), can use standard watch bands (the Apple Watch has dedicated bands), works with both Android smartphones and iPhones (the Apple Watch works only with iPhones) and costs less.

There just doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a wearable calculator, especially when it requires a smartphone to do anything more meaningful than tell time.

Is stereo dead? I’m an old guy who listened to vinyl records through some pretty nice speakers prior to the digital revolution.