Want the 411 on Storing Information?

Composed in Phoenix, Arizona--

It's the Information Age, baby.

My brother Rob just wrote to inform me of his new online storage account with a company called Carbonite.  Now he can store his computer files off-site and save room on his hard drive.  Scoff if you will, at the concept of paying rent for your .jpgs, .pdfs and .movs.  This information racket ain't what it used to be.

Consider that I'm composing this blog entry on a 60 gigabyte Dell Inspiron notebook computer.  It's my primary computer and the same machine that I take on the road when I'm out speaking.  Over time, I'm accumulating  tons of correspondence for my business, Edison House, not to mention my niece's cheerleader photos.   

The computer's hard drive filled up a while back, so I bought an external drive and then another.  External drives have amazing capacity, but without a better data storage system, I'll soon have a whole closet full of external hard drives.

The newest and largest hard drives feature a terabyte of storage.  A terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes or one trillion bytes. A terabyte is roughly the equivalent of the contents of books made from 50,000 trees. Tera comes from the Greek word teras meaning monster.  As in pterodactyl.

(I know pterodactyl begins with a "p" and doesn't even have the word tera in it, but this is an article about the wonder of numbers, not the craziness of language.)

Anyway, back to this business of using external drives to solve the info storage problem.  Here's the bad news:  all drives go bad.

Ian Ayres, author of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, reports that the entire Library of Congress takes up about twenty terabytes, but WalMart's data warehouse takes up about 570 terabytes.  We're storing more information than ever before.   

I guess it's time to get with the times.  As always, the trick is to anticipate what comes next after what comes next. 

Petabytes.  Petabytes are next.  A petabyte is around 1,000 terabytes. 

That's the 411 on storing information.