Yeah every couple years I buy new hard drives.
I have about a dozen that are about 10-20 years old. It’s getting hard to find a use for them, but so far I just use them as a 5th level backup, write once. I also destroyed a bunch that were too small.
You’re not doing an apples to apples analysis because the vehicle models are so different and have different prices. Split it into purchase price and running costs and you’ll find the EV is cheaper as long as you don’t pay too much initially.
Several other factors to consider. First CA is moving to an income based flat fee for electricity. What this means is that the per kWh cost is going to go down, probably by a significant amount. Look up ab205. This will swing things more to electricity.
Second gas is going to be subject to more and higher price spikes going forward. There is already a reluctance to build more infrastructure. In contrast increased solar is driving the wholesale price of electricity to zero during the day. Imagine you can charge at work for business rates. (Right now on sdge I can charge during the day at work for 20c kWh which is half residential price).
Third factor in the value of your time. How much is it worth to never have to go to a gas station. Or waste time on maintenance or repairs.
Use internal drives with a dock and store cold. Saves the hassle of dealing with a bunch of cases and power adapters.
For fully on backup all the time use a versioned backup like time machine or a cloud service.
I’d look at products like topaz photo ai. It should do things like color correction, brightness and sharpening. I don’t think it does dusts spot / scratches although that’s probably on the feature list to add. You could also use a two step process with another program for dust spots.
If topaz or similar ai product doesn’t do exactly what you want, I’d start scanning but wait a year or two to process as these programs are rapidly improving.
This is meaningless without knowing miles driven, cost per gallon and kwh.
Generally EV’s fuel costs are less than gas in CA but not an order of magnitude less.
E.g. a 30mpg car will cost 16c / mile in fuel in CA at $5/gallon. In Wyoming gas looks to be $3/gallon so 10c / mile. An EV getting 4 m/kwh will cost maybe 5-10c per mile depending on your plan in CA. It’s significantly better but not as much as implied by the OP.