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."

Comments

This artcical says 23 exabytes

[SirJaxalot]

here is the aritcal

Re:This artcical says 23 exabytes

[Vaevictis666]

Your article states:

They found that new information flowing across televisions, radios, telephones, Web sites and the Internet had increased by 3 1/2 times to a total of 18 exabytes as of 2002. The amount of new but stored (non-transmitted) information in 2002 was determined to be about five exabytes.

This jives with the other articles. 5 exabytes generated content, 18 exabytes transferred content - still one heck of a lot of bits floating around :)

Re:And about 1% was worthwhile

[Tenebrious1]

I wonder how much of that was duplicate data. How many copies of the Matrix are floating around online? Did they count FTP mirror sites as separate data?

The blurb said 92% was stored on magnetic media; curious about the rest, I looked glanced around the article. Surprisingly a large part, 7%, is FILM! The reason film comprised such a large percentage is that each film reel is duplicated thousands of times to be sent to theaters around the world.

So if they're counting duplicates in film, I'd guess they'd count duplicates in magnetic media.

Re:Ummm.. That's not data...

[uberdave]

The incredibly long thin strip of plastic with the tiny holes running along the edges is the media. The sequence of pictures is the data. What they did was figure out how big of an mpeg-2 file file would be needed to encode the movie. A lot of what this study is, is not so much how much data was generated, but how much new data storage capacity was generated. For example, if the industry produced 1 million blank cds, the study would show 700 million megabytes of new data.