Daily Doc: The (Digital) Universe is Expanding

This item comes from Jill Konieczko and Danielle Burton in the U.S. News Library:

A new report (pdf) estimates the amount of digital information the world created and copied in 2006 at 161 billion gigabytes. For the non-techies out there, that's "approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written - or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than the 93 million miles from the earth to the sun."

The report's project director explains that this explosion "represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analog form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it's infinite." And, if predictions for 2007 are correct, the amount of information will exceed existing storage capacity. Looking out even further, from 2006 to 2010, the digital universe will expand more than sixfold, to 988 exabytes (or 988 billion gigabytes).

To make your head spin even faster, imagine the implications for data management and architecture, not to mention privacy and security. And you might consider this a gentle reminder: delete all unwanted E-mails.

Etc.: Can Your Data Survive a Storm? on USNews.com