Drowning in Data

In 1990, a typical gigabyte of storage cost about $20,000.  Today it's down to less than $1.

Which is a good thing since the Days of officially drowning in data is almost upon us.

Tech analyst calculates that 161 exabytes were generated in 2006, that's about 161 billion GB, and that amount is expected to rise fast.

What is 161 exabytes?
161 Exabytes of digital data was generated in 2006, says researcher IDC. That's about 168 million terabytes, or roughly the equivalent of:
36 billion digital movies
43 trillion digital songs
1 million digital copies of every book in the Library of Congress
Source: IDC, UC Berkeley, USA TODAY research

Per person
About 213 gigabytes of information was generated for each person in North America in 2006.
Source: IDC, CIA World Factbook, USA TODAY research

How long will it last?
Expected shelf life of storage devices:
Low-end hard drive: 5 years
CD/DVD: 20 years
Source: IDC
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Print photographs from the 1800s are still viewable today. But floppy disks from the 1980s are very difficult to read.

As digital technology continues to evolve, there's a risk that "your great-grandkids won't be able to see your wedding pictures," Kay says.

To preserve data, businesses and consumers will probably have to periodically copy it from obsolete storage drives onto newer ones, he says.

And backups will become increasingly important. Consumers often store their digital music and photos on a single PC, EMC's Lewis says. But as that data collection grows, "People are going to have to start realizing that they have thousands of dollars tied up in digital information," he says.