with content being created on a daily basis and posted to social media or any other outlet, how is it all stored and managed? Will we ever run out of ‘space’?
In: Technology
TLDR: Yes, but then they’ll just add more.
Speaking as a Storage Administrator working in the IT industry, if you give users space they will find a way to fill it.
The data stored by web-based apps of this scale are typically in the form of databases and file stores located on dedicated storage appliances rather than individual servers. Think of this as a server rack full of hard drives controlled by a device that allows multiple servers to talk to it simultaneously. We call this a SAN (Storage Area Network)
These devices have massive amounts of space, often have built-in compression and de-duplication (replacing multiple copies of the same file with a single instance of that file) and are able to be expanded dynamically. They also include different Tiers of storage, files that are accessed frequently are stored on fast but expensive SSDs (Solid State Drives) and less used archived data is storage on slower but significantly cheaper spinning disk hard drives.
Basically you can buy another tray full of hard drives and click it in as you need it.
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