You know how change comes in short cycles within long cycles. I think that the successive waves of physical media were short cycles of technological advance, but that era--that long cycle--is drawing to a close.

We're disintermediating media, to coin a term sure to go viral.

My Tab ("our Tabs" yet?) support only the microSD memory card, but no drives of any kind; and the memory card is intended only to expand memory locally on the device. It's not there for interchange. When it comes to exchanging data, this new generation of devices does it directly, across wi-fi and the Net and bluetooth and infrared. No wires, no media.

The fate of your data from here on out is going to depend on how well you make provisions to keep it backed up and stored away from your person in the cloud, and nothing to do with transcribing physical media. That problem is about to become so Twentieth Century.

Your relationship with data is evolving from the data in your possession being the primary data, and backups are elsewhere; toward your primary data, however many terabytes of it there are, being held somewhere else--in the "cloud"--while your personal devices at any given hold only a tiny working subset of your data.

That's not to say that a prudent person won't make provision to protect sensitive data by keeping it on some kind of physical media, like a USB stick or SD card. Knowing that you value your privacy, bowser, I'll bet the thought of somebody else holding your data must really raise those hackles, and I sympathize. I have gigabytes of data that only I care about and can store in the cloud without worry. But there's the odd megabyte or so of personal correspondence and the like that will never, ever, be out of my control.

Technology can take away your privacy, but you can always use technology to get it back. It's an old arms race.