The amount of digital data I generate requiring permanent, secure, and redundant storage is overwhelming.   From digital photos and movies from both standard and high definition sources to digitized music, software, and documents, organizing and indexing this mess of information is daunting to say the least.   And realizing that this data accumulation phase of my life will likely continue for decades to come makes me cringe at the thought of managing it through time and technological change.

This situation is not unique.   As consumer electronics devices continue to generate increasing volumes of data, the average consumer will have to figure out a way to store this information or risk loosing it forever.   And while several good solutions exist, they’re expensive, require a pre-disposition towards organization, and don’t address the overall trend of humanity’s swelling digital footprint.

On a much larger scale, a scale encompassing all of the world’s accumulated data, new research suggests that sometime this year the “digital universe” will surpass 1.2 Zettabytes (1 Zettabyte = 1 Billion Terabytes).   That’s 200 Gigabytes for each person on the planet, which at $100 per Terabyte, puts the nominal value of all the worlds information at approximately $120 Billion (although its actual value is immeasurable and priceless).  I’m way over this 200GB average, are you?

From the Guardian:

“…experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.  This year, the planet’s digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier to reach 1.2 ZB, according to the fourth annual survey of the world’s bits and bytes conducted by technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC.  A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.

…

The vast majority of this information, meanwhile, is “unstructured”, which means it has not been specifically created so it can easily be indexed, sorted, catalogued and retrieved.”

Much like my personal data crisis, the world’s Zettabytes of data could become similarly unmanageable if careful steps aren’t taken to mitigate this.  As companies build massive server farms and push the convenience of cloud computing on consumers, the coalescence of digital information is expected to increase by up to 44x over the next decade – making current methods of indexing and search quickly obsolete.  I’m confident this growth will fuel decades of research, discovery, and commercial growth within a variety of technological industries.

[Via:  The Guardian]