With (millions? billions?) of humans creating content (and metadata?) every day, how does the data storage keep up? Are they adding additional storage every day?
In: Technology
There’s no one checking the population and adjusting the world’s digital storage requirements accordingly.
Companies make money from creating and selling storage, both physical and digital. A rise in use means *someone* is buying more. Companies adjust their output with market demands. Short answer; capitalism.
There is no single unified world data storage.
Whatever you store is either on a device (if you run out of space, you buy either more storage or a new device with more storage), or on a server somewhere (the company that owns the server buys more storage whenever they need to).
Storage is cheap. There is massive infrastructure to build storage devices, house them, and connect them in truly gigantic numbers. And growing more and more sites and locations and such that do this every day. Things are working as planned.
And also compression. We’re gradually improving ways to make data smaller, which means we need less storage space. As a tiny example, you know mp3s? Those are super compressed. A cd album worth of music should be like 500MB -700 MB give or take. Roughly 10MB per minute. A now, fairly ancient file format, mp3 does high quality audio in 1 – 1.5 MB per minute. Oh the horror days of downloading like a 10 second wave audio file on a 14.4K modem line. MP3s were amazing. Now expand this to all other file formats.
Why do you think Google and Amazon spend *literal* billions of dollars every year building new servers? It isn’t just so they can have more processors working. Servers are also data storage facilities.
The supply is *constantly* growing, and tech companies are always looking for ways to store more data, or to be more efficient with the storage they already use, or to encode or summarize data better so they don’t have to store as much of it.
People add storage as they need it. This creates a demand for more storage and so manufacturers make more storage to sell. Over time, this means that storage technology increases, and so people find that they can store more for less, so they tend to create more content and store it, which in turn increases demand.
As another point, businesses count storage cost as a factor. So, for instance, when you’re using YouTube, you’re “paying” for that storage. They’re typically selling your attention to advertisers and use some of the profit to purchase more storage.
It doesn’t. A lot of things are being lost and destroyed everyday. A lot of internet links are dead.
There is an enormous amount of infrastructure behind the internet, its just not something most people see. I work at a data center and literally half of all power in my city’s metro area goes to my data center campus.
My company has about 25-30 EXAbytes of storage capacity right now. 1000 gigs=1 terabyte, 1000 terabytes=1 Peta byte. 1000 Petabytes=1 exa byte. That is a incomprehensible amount of storage. We’re looking to 10x that within the decade and are building new campuses left and right, to the extent that were worried about how we’regoing to power it all. And that’s just one company.
That being said, companies actually are struggling with it. A lot of places have just recently discovered the value of Metadata, and have started storing literally every piece of information about you that they can. That takes up a lot of space, so the data center industry is exploding. And that’s without even getting into the AI topic.
“users upload 400 hours of video each minute” – [report on Youtube from 2017](https://mashable.com/article/youtube-one-billion-hours-of-video-daily)
> Are they adding additional storage every day?
yes; hard disk sales [peaked around 600,000,000/year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/398951/global-shipment-figures-for-hard-disk-drives/) which is about 1.6 million/day. NB. while the number has gone down, each one stores more now than 12 years ago, and SSDs have taken over a lot of the storage market.
How does the world keep up with human food consumption requirements? Make more food
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