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Info Glut - Five Exabytes of Data Created in 2002
securitas writes "If you had any doubts that you are overwhelmed by the volume of information in your life, a new Berekley study (PDF) shows that five exabytes of data were created in 2002, twice the 1999 total. That's five million terabytes of data, or 500,000 Libraries of Congress, which works out to about 800 MB of data for each of the 6.3 billion people on the planet. Of note is that 92 percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, which may create an interesting problem for historians and archaeologists of the future. The study was conducted by University of California-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian. More at CNet, Infoworld, ByteAndSwitch and The Register."
...and most of it is still sitting in my Inbox at work right now.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
That's a lot of porn. Though I think their stats are off a bit, as I have 800gb of porn, not mb. Oh well, better luck next year!
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
IS IN PDF! Now we know who to blame...
a new Berekley study (PDF) shows that five exabytes of data were created in 2002,
:-)
Shoot, it felt like my doctoral dissertation was responsible for at least 2 of those 5 exabytes.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Of note is that 92 percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, which may create an interesting problem for historians and archaeologists of the future.
Well, why won't they just print it ? Sheesh...
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
And if you don't count all the troll and flamebait comments on Slashdot, we're down to 1 exabyte!
There has to be a special section in that report on Nigerian email!
But if these data were recorded on floppies, and stacked up to the moon n times, how many VWs would it take to carry those floppies to the stack site?
sulli
RTFJ.
I personally burned over 500 CDs last year
Congrats, you balanced out 1 medium-sized tribe in Africa.
It's a joke..
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Of course, this never takes into account backup media and the whole backup infrastructure (anyone price decent commercial backup software recently?).
:
take this
Real Men don't make backups. They
upload it via ftp and let the world mirror it.
Not least for those historians who want to know what my Amazon.com session ID was on the day that my Runescape character hit mining level 33.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
"I wonder how much of that was duplicate data."
3% was [AOL] Me Too! [/AOL] posts.
1% was In Soviet Russia jokes.
0.5% Profit!!!
So I guess there was a fair amount of duplication.
KFG
I for one welcome our new data generating overlords!
With all that data you'd think that my conne3^$ATDT01[NO CARRIER]
In Soviet Russia data generates YOU!
Homer: I see they have the Internet on computers now.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
5 billion files are created every day.
3 billion of them will never be found again.
Poor files...
When men used to be men
Of note is that 92 percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, which may create an interesting problem for historians and archaeologists of the future.
They fail to mention that also of note is that 99% of that informations is in the form of pr0n! That's a lot!
I wonder how they count film too, as film is not digital medium did they MPEG2 it a la DVD, or take the raw footage from the cameras (as long as it wasn't a direct analog to analog transfer)... and what about photographs - did they count them and if so at the molecular level of the photo paper?
I only glanced through the numbers, but couldn't find any place that said "for our purposes pictures are considered HxV resolution". For film (studio movies), they did say each frame was considered a picture and that sound contained a lot of data, but well again, I don't know how they sampled it.
Maybe they just used "a picture is worth 1000 words". Hmm... no, at 5 characters an average word, that's only 5K per picture, way too low.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
does that count?
Some days at my job I create gigs of test data every few minutes.