The need for large scale preservation

The JISC Digitisation blog has posted the image below from Wired magazine. Go ahead...stare at the words in the table and think. In one year, the amount of photos uploaded to Facebook equal all of the data and images collected by the Hubble space telescope. All of the videos on YouTube are nearly five times the size of the data & images collected by Hubble. And the amount of data processed by Google every 72 minutes? Unfathomable.

Preserving digital content isn't something that must be addressed in the future, it must be addressed now. And the solutions need to have small repositories of a few gigabytes as well as repositories that contain petabytes. (A petabyte is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes.) No one should be burying their heads in the sand on this topic.

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Technorati tag: Digital Preservation