Information Research Weblog

You've probably all read this one already, but it was new to me today. The School of Information Management and Systems has had a project runnning to calculate how much 'information' is produced and/or distributed annually. Their current estimate is that:

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

What's an exabyte? Here's a definition from SearchStorage.com:

An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

Or, as the authors of the SIMS report put it:

...five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

I knew there was too much of the damned stuff!