The information age

IDC estimated that last year the world generated 161 exabytes, or 161 billion Gigabytes of data. This is including both originally produced data as well as replicated data. Regardless of the data type, this poses the question - how are we going to store all this data? It is estimated that by the year 2010, we will be incapable of producing sufficient storage to keep all the data that will have been generated by then.

The year 2010 does not seem nearly so far away. That is a mere 3 years ahead in our future. Compared to the energy crises and oil crises that are estimated to climax around 2050 or so, 2010 seems just a blink away. Well, what are we going to do about this upcoming issue?

Several possible solutions:
1. Better storage units - innovation from the traditional hard drives
2. Master copy of data - maintaining only one master copy of data allows replications to be deleted when not needed
3. Deletion of old data

Personally, I am hoping for the first of the three. I feel that when the need arises, companies will naturally seek out new and better ways of storing data. With ever improving nanotechnology as well as miniaturization of computer components such as CPU's, I believe that we will be able to find more efficient methods of storage for data as well.