The Thumb Drive
When I was in high school we kept any computer related files on 3.5 inch floppy disks, all four years.
I started college in 2002. We had access to re-writable CD's but they were expensive. In some classes the labs were Mac, others were PC. Back then physical media was formatted for one or the other. So for our school we used Zip disks. You had one formatted for the PC lab and another for the Mac lab. It all worked out.
Then something shifted the next year and my school suddenly moved to CD-R's (which became cheap and disposable) and these things called thumb drives. Back then thumb drives came in megabytes. I want to say my first one was 16mb and formatted for windows. We used them to move files from the computer we were working on to the one computer in the lab connected to the printer.
At some point we stopped using the CDR's or CDRW's for anything other than long term storage or music. Everything switched over to the thumb drives. By the time I graduated in 2006 I not only had a 256mb thumb drive but an iPod shuffle that was basically a thumb drive with a headphone jack.
You could get a massive tower of raw CDRW's for like fifteen bucks at Walmart and just write whatever to them and toss them afterwards. I still have a few from the olden days that no joke, just have a bunch of old memes and flash animations on them. I'm not even sure how to fun .SWF files anymore.
I remember later getting a stick with a whopping 1 gig of storage. Things escalated from there so quickly I can't even remember how it went. One day the things were $100 per GB then the next it was a single dollar per GB. In 2012 I installed the first solid state hard drive in my computer. I paid a dollar a GB for an 80GB hard drive.
I just looked up on Amazon and I can get a micro SD card with 256gigs for $25. They do come in TB but nothing I have that uses SD cards can wrangle that kind of space. 8-16gb is the sweet spot for single board computer type applications.
Some day laptops and computers won't even have USB ports, just load everything to cloud storage and wirelessly charge on your desk.