Zoom in on Zettabytes

May 10, 2010 by +Marj Wyatt
Filed under Communicating for Success, Featured, Marj Wyatt's Musings

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Most of us don’t think twice about what is involved in maintaining the platforms the Social Networking and Social Bookmarking potpourri of sites that we use each day in our online businesses. These days, the focus is mostly on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Other useful sites are LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, and Last.fm … to name a few. Then there are he multiple free email accounts we have.

When it comes to our home computing environments, we unconsciously manage disk space every day. If we have self-hosted blogs, we look for and choose hosting vendors who permit us to have unlimited storage for our websites. Yet, we take the storage of our Tweets and posts for granted.

Every piece of content must be stored somewhere. In the early days of email, I was part of a group who studied email etiquette with interest. We discussed computing capacity issues, like storage, too. A friend of mine, who worked for EMC, wrote a fascinating white paper about the exponential growth of data storage. Her predictions have been exceeded by mounds and mounds and mounds of data. None of us foresaw the advent of micro-blogging in 1985, let alone text messaging on a cell phone!

Recent research by IDC revealed that our digital universe grew by 62% during the last year alone. The stunning amount of storage online at the time of the study was 800,000 petabytes, a measure better described at this link. In short, it is one million gigabytes. By the end of 2010, it is predicted that there will be 1.2 zettabytes online. A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States. Whew! And I’m worrying about a few gigabytes around here.

Computers and the internet have made our lives easier, much more public and availed methods to get income online for some of us too. Pages upon pages of material sifted and listed, categorized and presented for our reading pleasure with a few keystrokes and a button click. Since our content is cached and stored online indefinitely, one begins to wonder if our content will outlive our grandchildren. Who can say?