Ars Technica reports that there is now more digital information in existence than there is storage capacity on earth.
They say that this number reached 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes) in 2007, which adds up to about 45GB of digital information for each person on earth. For the first time ever, the total volume of digital content exceeds total storage capacity. IDC speculates that, by 2011, only half of the digital universe will be stored.
It took me a bit to wrap my head around this. How can data exist if it is not being stored somewhere? The answer seems to be that a chunk of this data is always in transit at any given moment. There are petabytes of data constantly flowing through networks around the plant.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday that gave a good analogy for this. Cities like New York actually have more cars than parking spaces. The only reason the system works is because there are always some cars on the roads. If the roads were shut down for some reason, there would be a big problem.
Makes you wonder what would happen if the Internet came crashing to a halt. Where would we put all that data if we had to “park” it?
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