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Info Overload! Billions of Bytes Born

Posted by byteandswitch.com on October 28, 2003

Tags: Infrastructure,  Other

Channel: Data Center, Other

If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You're as prolific as the average person on the planet.

That's according to a team of University of California at Berkeley researchers who claim there were about 5 exabytes of new information stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media in 2002. And because nobody's volunteering to do a recount, we'll take their word for it.

How much is 5 exabytes? It's 5 million terabytes -- or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- which is enough data to fill the print collections of the entire Library of Congress 500,000 times. And that's twice as much new information as was created in 1999, when the Berkeley researchers first conducted the study. The team, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, estimated that the storage of new information has grown about 30 percent each year since 1999.

"All of a sudden, almost every aspect of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information format," says Lyman. "It takes thoughtful people using smart technologies to figure out how to make sense of all this information."

And 5 exabytes is the amount of information stored only on physical media. The researchers discovered nearly 18 exabytes of new information flowed electronically over TV, radio, telephone, and the Internet in 2002.