The average person in the United States carries around a huge amount of data with them. Personally, I have a smartphone with 16GB of internal space, with a 32GB micro SD card in it, and numerous flash drives of varying sizes. I may not be completely average, since I am in the tech business, but even just the cell phone's internal space would allow for over four thousand pictures to be stored. As you can imagine, no one would want to lose their precious data, so it is important to backup the information to another device.

Backing up a few thousand photos does not really take much room, but then you get into the size of videos, or audio files. Videos are a whole different issue, considering that 10 minutes of video at 1080p is often over 1GB in size, so that same 16GB would not hold much. Thankfully we have much larger external devices to use as backup devices, ranging from flash memory to large mechanical hard drives.