Header
Backing Up Billions of Bytes
By Tom Shoop | Friday, March 31, 2006  |  10:21 AM

According to estimates presented at a National Institutes of Standards and Technology conference, the world now generates new digital information equal to the entire collection of the U.S. Library of Congress every 15 minutes. That's about five exabytes (five quintillion bytes or five billion gigabytes) a year. NIST is trying to figure out how to keep much of that data from simply disappearing, or becoming "as incomprehensible as the markings on Babylonian cuneiform tablets."


Post a comment



ABOUT THIS BLOG


Government Executive Editor Tom Shoop takes a look at news and events affecting the federal bureaucracy, from the perspective of a longtime observer of government.

SEARCH THIS BLOG