Data Hungry Humans to Generate 50 Times More Information by 2020
Data Hungry Humans to Generate 50 Times More Information by 2020
Posted 06/30/2011 at 5:57am
| by Paul Lilly
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Before you skimp on the size of your next hard drive to shave a few bucks off your system build, you should consider the state of the digital universe. To help you do that, IDC put together its fifth annual study of the digital universe sponsored by EMC Corporation and found that it's, well, big and vast. We already knew that last year when planet Earth broke the zettabyte barrier, and by the end of 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (that's 1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of 9 in just five years, IDC says.
Those 1.8 trillion gigabytes are contained in 500 quadrillion files, a number that more than doubles every two years and is also as many bits of information in the digital universe as there are stars in our physical universe.
"However, unlike our physical universe where matter is neither created nor destroyed, our digital universe is replete with bits of data that exist but for a moment -- enough time for our eyes or ears to ingest the information before the bits evaporate into a nonexistent digital dump," IDC says.
Two-thirds of the information in the digital universe is generated by individuals, though enterprises have some liability for 80 percent of information at some point in its digital life. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times the amount of information as today and 75 times the number of "information containers," while IT staff to manage it will grow less than 1.5 times, according to the study.
You can check out the full report here (PDF) and a nifty infographic here (PDF).
Image Credit: IDC
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Gezzer
June 30, 2011 at 1:52pm
How much of the data is/will be useless garbage?
As well either redundant or indentical informantion?
I know I'm using space to store stuff I don't need for one reason or another. The biggest one being way too lazy to try to figure out what I need to keep, but too unsure of losing something I need if I start purging. I'd say of the 10+ terabytes of space I have I've used 5. So if I have 5 gigs of unneeded data, that's 1% (I think) . If that holds true for everyone else that's a lot extra garbage.
Then consider anything being saved by more then one user. How many driver installers do I still have, even for earlier versions. Times that by say half the people who use a similar video card, chipset, etc. Then photos, emails, etc. I know that most of my family photos are in a least 3 drop box accounts, plus on at least 10 other people's computers. Then there's out of date back ups, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of data, say 25%, is pretty much useless or not needed for the above reasons. As well as more people share data and use the cloud will this percentage increase of decrease? I know in real life I seem to accumlate more and more "stuff" just due to the years rolling by, and some I could get rid of but just might need some day. Why shouldn't the same be true of our on-line life as well?
Carlidan
June 30, 2011 at 1:05pm
That's all? And stop downloading all that porn!
All kidding aside. That's alot of data.
ShyLinuxGuy
June 30, 2011 at 10:19am
Yeah, I can relate to this. 500GB seemed like a lot, but when I had all my VM's, my music, my projects, and big space-hogging stuff like my CS5 suite, plus my Ubuntu and Windows 7 partitions, I quickly had to create a ~1 TB striped array. I wasn't running out of space, but I was sure that was going to happen down the road.
TerribleToaster
June 30, 2011 at 6:58am
Hard to imagine how much data a single person would use 50 years from now.
Side Note:
"Data Hungry Humans Generate [...]"
As much as that makes perfect sense, it still feels awkward to me.
The English language needs new words for consuming and generating data that aren't so counter-intuitive when used in the same sentence.
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