Some use is being found for all those cheap 1TB drives coming out, then?
Udhay
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080312-study-amount-of-digital-info-global-storage-capacity.html
Ars Technica
From the Newsdesk
Study: amount of digital info > global storage capacity
By Ryan Paul | Published: March 12, 2008 - 10:30AM CT
An IDC research study sponsored by information
management giant EMC provides insight into the
explosive growth of digital information. IDC uses
a complex formula to estimate the size of the
"digital universe," the total volume of digital
information that is created and replicated globally.
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.
IDC attributes accelerated growth to the
increasing popularity of digital television and
cameras that rely on digital storage. Major
drivers of digital content growth include
surveillance, social networking, and cloud
computing. Visual content like images and video
account for the largest portion of the digital
universe. According to IDC, there are now over a
billion digital cameras and camera phones in the
world and only ten percent of photos are captured on regular film.
The study also reveals that the volume of
information about us generated automatically on a
daily basis surpasses the total volume of digital
information that we actively create about
ourselves. IDC notes that this trend has
significant privacy implications and that
pressure will increasingly fall on the IT sector
to address information management issues that pertain to privacy.
My personal daily digital footprint
"We discovered that only about half of your
digital footprint is related to your individual
actionstaking pictures, sending e-mails, or
making digital voice calls," IDC senior vice
president John Gantz said in a statement. "The
other half is what we call the 'digital
shadow'information about younames in financial
records, names on mailing lists, web surfing
histories or images taken of you by security
cameras in airports or urban centers. For the
first time your digital shadow is larger than the
digital information you actively create about yourself."
Another issue addressed by the IDC study is the
environment impact of digital content growth.
High turn-over rate for mobile phones and other
electronics create a lot of "eWaste" and power
consumption in data centers is climbing at an extremely rapid pace.
Although the methodology that IDC uses to compute
the total volume of digital content encompasses a
lot of hand-waving and some unverifiable
assumptions, the trends documented by the study
seem quite defensible. The rapidly accelerating
expansion of the digital universe will
undoubtedly continue as new and better
technologies make information easier to produce
and distribute. As the total amount of
information grows, so too will the privacy risks
associated with our expanding digital shadows.
One can only hope that the evolution of privacy
safeguards will manage to keep up.
Further reading
* IDC's report in PDF form
* You can calculate your own digital
footprint with Mac OS X and Windows apps
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
