Scientists report data storage explosion

Study: E-mails, digital media produce mountain of data

Story Tools RELATED Business 2.0: Dealing with information overload  TRACKING THE FLOW In addition to looking at stored data, UC Berkeley measured electronic flows of new information at 18 billion gigabytes in 2002, of which about 17.3 billion gigabytes occurred over the telephone. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Data Storage Technology (general) University of California Peter Lyman or Create your own Manage alerts | What is this?

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- All those e-mails -- junk or otherwise -- are adding up.

In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill 500,000 U.S. Libraries of Congress, according to a study by faculty and students at the University of California at Berkeley.

The 5 billion gigabytes of new data works out to about 800 megabytes per person - the equivalent of a stack of books 30 feet (9 meters) high -- the study by the university's School of Information Management and Systems found.

That's a 30 percent increase in stored information from 1999, the last time the global study was conducted.

The information area with the biggest percentage increase in data was, unsurprisingly, hard disk drives. The study found the amount of stored information on these increasingly high-capacity storage media rose by up to 114 percent from the previous study in 1999.

The study also put to rest any lingering myths about the paperless office. The amount of information stored on paper, including books, journals and office documents, increased up to 43 percent in 2002 compared to 1999.

"We thought in our [last] study that film and paper would head toward digital formats," UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman said.

With paper, that has not been the case, as people access documents on their computer, but then print them out, he said.

But photography is fulfilling his initial expectations.

"Individual photographs are really moving quickly to digital cameras, or even image-producing telephones," Lyman said. That helped contribute to a decline of up to 9 percent in film-based photographs in 2002 compared with 1999, and fueled the growth of magnetic storage.

The study received financing from Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp. , Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp., technology companies whose businesses deal with managing information.

Whether or not that information has any value is another question.

"I couldn't come up with a very simple way of understanding quality because it's so much in the eye of the beholder," Lyman said.

How, or if, all that information actually ends up being used will be the topic of his next study, Lyman added.

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