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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."
Hooray for exponential curves! It is daunting, though. As an illustration of this, I read that the White House has already turned over 2 million pages of documents relating to 9/11 to the independent investigation panel.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. --Carl Sagan
I wonder how many pages of paper an exabyte of data would take up? We're talking about gigantic masses, here. Why not figure it out? I'm guessing, based on character counts from Open Office, that you can get about 2kB of data on a single sheet. That's 4kB if you use both sides. And you get around 125 sheets per pound... So, based on some guesses, it looks like it will take 2,251,799,813,685 pounds of paper to print one exabyte of this data. For all 5 exabytes, we're looking at a wieght 122 times that of the Great Pyramid. Not as much as I'd suspected... but still fun!