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Opinion
Are You Drowning in Data?
3/8/2007
Tech analyst John Gantz estimates that in 2007 the world will for the first time generate more "data" than it has storage space for. But that's not really the major kind of crisis it might seem. After all, a lot of the data are things no one intends to store in the first place. (Witness, for example, live, 24-hour video feeds of building construction on many campuses. Nobody plans to store all of that video!)I wrote recently about a book in which one narrative subplot was the digitization of the entire British museum and library, and then storage of basically all of the world's knowledge, culture, and history on a single chip. That chip was generated, fictionally, in 2025 and had a capacity of 128 petabytes. Gantz calculates that in 2006, humans generated 161 exabytes (164,864 petabytes) of digital data.
Wow.
My first hard drive was a 20 MB external drive to an early Macintosh desktop machine. I was absolutely thrilled by that capacity. Heck, I was thrilled the first time I used an IBM Selectric typewriter with a magnetic card that could store a few typed lines. Now I'm a bit frustrated by the 80 GB capacity of my current laptop because I have recently had to take a bunch of images off of it and store them on a central server.
Having less storage space than I have data is not something I am personally worried about. As a data storage consumer, I have watched my costs for storage go down and my options go up. I am delighted that my laptop, my camera, and my phone each have a 2 GB storage chip inserted and that the chips didn't cost a fortune. My concerns are finding stuff I have stored and worrying about losing access to data stored in archaic formats. How about you?
Disappearing data
On the largest scale of finding or forever losing things, those of us who use the Web constantly have gotten used to the fact that favorite "places" can disappear. We have very little control about who deletes what off of some server on the other side of the world. Like many, I often "print to PDF" an important resource that I locate on the Web, and store it on my own hard drive. I sure hope that PDF never becomes an archaic, unreadable format in my lifetime.
Recently I learned that the website of the joint conference that SCUP and others held last year, the Campus of the Future conference, had its plug pulled. I wasn't happy about that. I am the type of person who never throws anything away. But it wasn't my decision. Sure enough, since that happened, a short while ago I've had to respond to two queries from people who were looking for information that had once been on that website. Luckily for me, the
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