The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. This from a how much information study at Berkeley.
- linda 10-23-2000 3:19 pm

Great link. Really informative. Those are some mind blowing numbers. I didn't see any discussion of the problem I've been thinking about recently, which stems from the fact that while disk space is clearly increasing at a phenomenal rate, disk transfer speeds are not. How do you back up an exabyte hard disk if the transfer speed is only 50 mb/sec? I'm sure "they" will work it out, but I can't see how at this point.

Here's a link to a story about a company that claims to have mapped the entire internet. Unlike your link, this one is a little short on details, but it has some interesting numbers about the explosive growth of info on the net (especially pornography.)

Your company must generate a lot of data. Do you store all the old stuff? If so, do you know how big the database is?
- jim 10-23-2000 4:50 pm [add a comment]


  • we save everything, sure. i'll try to find out. figure we get around 75,000 stories in per day, plus we are trying to integrate bell & howell's archives, which are HUGE.
    - linda 10-24-2000 1:14 am [add a comment]






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