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Digital Big Bang — 161 Exabytes In 2006

Posted by kdawson on from the had-we-but-world-enough-and-room-to-store-it dept.

An anonymous reader tips us to an AP story on a recent study of how much data we are producing. IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information. The last time anyone tried to estimate global information volume, in 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley came up with 5 exabytes. (The current study tries to account for duplicating data — on the same assumptions as the 2003 study it would have come out at 40 exabytes.) By 2010, according to IDC, we will be producing far more data than we will have room to store, closing in on a zettabyte.

13 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. XXX by daddyrief · · Score: 5, Funny

    And half of that is porn...

    --
    "Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
  2. It was only 9 megs by noewun · · Score: 5, Funny

    Without Slashdot dupes.

    --
    I am a believer of momentum and curves.
  3. Finally, an excuse... by bigforearms · · Score: 5, Funny

    The furry porn gets deleted first.

  4. Sorry, my fault... by slobber · · Score: 5, Funny

    I left cat /dev/urandom running

    --
    "You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
  5. And here I thought Malthus was dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We won't be running out of space just like we didn't run out of food. New technology will allow us to store ever more data.

  6. Re:How many... by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 5, Funny

    That'd be 1,191,400 Libraries of Congress.

    Honestly, I don't know why the /. editors allow these "scientific articles" that only provide data in these obscure and archaic "byte" measurements. Absurd!

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    Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
  7. Must be the space donuts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    So the sum total of data has increased by a factor of more than 30 since 2003? I knew Brent Spiner was putting on weight, but damn.

  8. The awesome information we retain by iPaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Web server log files with the history of people clicking around. My address stored by everybody I ever bought anything on line from. It's more an information land-fill than an information warehouse.

    --
    Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
  9. And there used to be so little on-line data by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's really striking is how little data was available in machine-readable form well into the computer era. In the 1970s, the Stanford AI lab got a feed from the Associated Press wire, simply to get a source of machine-readable text for test purposes. There wasn't much out there.

    In 1971, I visited Western Union's installation in Mawah, NH, which was mostly UNIVAC gear. (I worked at a UNIVAC site a few miles away, so I was over there to see how they did some things.) I was shown the primary Western Union international gateway, driven by a pair of real-time UNIVAC 494 computers. All Western Union message traffic between the US and Europe went through there. And the traffic volume was so small that the logging tape was just writing a block every few seconds. Of course, each message cost a few dollars to send; these were "international telegrams".

    Sitting at a CRT terminal was a woman whose job it was to deal with mail bounces. About once a minute, a message would appear on her screen, and she'd correct the address if possible, using some directories she had handy, or return the message to the sender. Think about it. One person was manually handling all the e-mail bounces for all commercial US-Europe traffic. One person.

  10. Re:How many... by franksands · · Score: 5, Informative
    Since you asked:

    Oh, the equivalents! 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.

    I don't have anime estimates, but I can make a Heroes analogy.a hi-def episode is more or less 700mb. Considering the first season has 23 episodes, that would make 16.1gb. So 161 exabytes would be 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) seasons of Heroes. Since the earth currenlty has around 6.6 billion people, this would mean that you would have 1 episode for each person on the planet, and all the people of China, India and the US would have a second episode. That's how big it is.

    Regarding the storage space, I call shenanigans. We already have HDD that stores terabytes. A couple years from now, MS office will require that space to be installed.

  11. Re:How many... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    760 billion episodes of anime.In other words, about half the length of a typical Dragonball Z fight scene.

  12. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  13. Low SNR by Jekler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As interesting as the sheer volume is, most of it is garbage. I'd rather have 50 terabytes of organized and accurate information than 500 exabytes of data that isn't organized, and even if it were, it's accuracy is questionable at best. In essence, even if you manage to find what you want, the correctness of that information is likely to be very low.

    I've long said we are not in the information age, we are in the data age. The information age will be when we've successfully organized all this crap we're storing/transmitting.