In Brendan Traw's technology insight presentation, he hit on the need for easy backups and metadata, but didn't really tell us how Intel was going to help.
We could soon have homes where media is spread across numerous devices and mounts up to consume disk space in the order of Terabytes. While not all of that will be irreplaceable, some of it will need to be backed up, such as family photos and home videos. Traw stated that as the number of devices containing a hard drive within the home increases, the chance of one hard drive failing increases. However, with all those hard drives comes the means for data to be backed up across them.
Such a backup mechanism would be ideal as it leverages existing disk space and doesn't require the handling of lots of external media, but Traw didn't suggest any Intel technologies that would facilitate such data protection.
Traw also explained the importance of metadata. The number of files we possesses is increasing at a similar rate to the amount of space they take up. Metadata is of growing importance, allowing files to be given context, making searching and categorising much easier.
The current problem is that nobody adds metadata to anything. Content providers online can help by adding good metadata to their content, but for home generated content metadata is also necessary. So how do we easily add metadata without it taking a lot of time? WinFS looked to make inroads into that, but now that that's been canned, we're not really sure what's going to happen now.
So, if you have any cunning metadata or distributed backup ideas, put your answers on a postcard.
