Call me old fashioned, but I don't see why anyone but a search engine like google would need anything like a petabyte. You can have only so much useful information about anything. Sounds to me like, fill your garage with sh1t, build a bigger garage.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't see why anyone but a search engine like google would need anything like a petabyte. You can have only so much useful information about anything. Sounds to me like, fill your garage with sh1t, build a bigger garage.
Unfortunately, you gather up a lot of digital stuff fast and most of the time it's not useful. Take for example my business mail, it's full of old presentations and random versions of various documents and whatnot. Is it worth cleaning up? No. Is it worth keeping? Well, from time to time clients start asking about old things and it's very useful to have it. I figure 90% of it could be deleted, only keeping final versions and important mails. Of those 90% will never be asked for again, so I keep 100% for maybe 1%. Make a company with hundreds of thousands of people all like that and you get huge, huge amounts of data. It's still cheaper than to go through those huge, huge amounts of data. That goes double for many automated data collection processes - it's cheaper to keep until it's all guaranteed useless than trying to sort it out.
Oh, come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, come on. (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me old fashioned, but I don't see why anyone but a search engine like google would need anything like a petabyte. You can have only so much useful information about anything. Sounds to me like, fill your garage with sh1t, build a bigger garage.
Unfortunately, you gather up a lot of digital stuff fast and most of the time it's not useful. Take for example my business mail, it's full of old presentations and random versions of various documents and whatnot. Is it worth cleaning up? No. Is it worth keeping? Well, from time to time clients start asking about old things and it's very useful to have it. I figure 90% of it could be deleted, only keeping final versions and important mails. Of those 90% will never be asked for again, so I keep 100% for maybe 1%. Make a company with hundreds of thousands of people all like that and you get huge, huge amounts of data. It's still cheaper than to go through those huge, huge amounts of data. That goes double for many automated data collection processes - it's cheaper to keep until it's all guaranteed useless than trying to sort it out.