Just before several friends of mine have been backing up their digital data to external hard drives. I being a decade or two late still backup my digital data - mostly photos, videos and some text documents on CDs and DVDs. It would be interesting to see how many people received external hard drives this Christmas. Jennifer McAdams wrote an interesting article in Computerworld entitled Storage Projects Rise in Importance and it reports that in 2008 almost everyone will be finding ways to manage data.
According to Milford, Mass.-based analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., private-sector archive capacity will hit an eye-popping 27,000 petabytes by 2010. Skyrocketing rates of e-mail growth account for much of this figure.
For instance, the University of Pittsburgh now pegs monthly e-mail traffic at more than 30 million messages, vs. 17 million just one year ago.
Other new factors driving the need for capacity include the pervasiveness of large files, be they media-rich elements or specialized program data such as the computer-aided design drawings now used in building everything from cars to furniture. Cloned copies of the same information are also bogging down many corporate networks.
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Now that is one serious information overload dilemma. Do read Jennifer McAdams article it is an interesting article and this bit of news highlights the importance of trimming the data fat.
I wonder though is it software/infrastructure solution that is needed or is it a management solution that is needed. One solution would be to go back to how the first repositories of information handled information overload. And these are Archives and Libraries. In each group aside from expanding its infrastructure and maximize its space in storing books and records other things were done. Archivists and Librarians often conceptualized, put down in writing and implemented collection development policies - both in terms of collecting for and weeding from the collection.
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