The University of California (UCAL) Berkeley has completed its second “How Much Information” study. The researchers conclude that the the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years, reaching five miliion terabytes or five billion gigabytes or five exabytes by the end of 2002, compared to half that in 1999.
I wish I could remember the source — probably Wired or could have been something Kurzweil wrote — of some geek's estimate that if you could digitize all the experiences of an average human being's lifetime, you would end up with 5 terabytes of data.
Nonetheless, a terabyte is still an awfully big chunk of data.