So Much Data, So Little Time

MSNBC:

A new study assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content zipping around. The researchers also assumed that on average, each digital file gets replicated three times.

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital information last year.

That’s like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You’d need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

In fact, the supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it. IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.

Fortunately, storage space is not actually scarce and continues to get cheaper. That’s because not everything gets warehoused. Not only do e-mails get deleted, but some digital signals are not made to linger, like the contents of phone calls.

“Someone has to make a decision about what to store and what not,” Chuck Hollis, vice president of technology alliances at EMC Corp.said. “How do we preserve our heritage? Who’s responsible for keeping all of this stuff around so our kids can look at it, so historians can look at it? It’s not clear.”

Photo by henry37.

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