How long is my data? 💾

Posted 2 May 2020
Tagged with digital-preservation, fun-stuff, glitch
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Yesterday, Stuart Lewis posted a photo of his latest hardware:

Stuart Lewis @stuartlewis

Ever wondered what a petabye of storage looks like these days? This...! These have just been delivered and are destined to be installed next week in the @natlibscot preservation storage system (96 x 14TB 7.2K SATA drives --> geo replicated @scality system) pic.twitter.com/YMoeRprudM

11:44 AM · 30 Apr 2020

After some back-and-forth in our replies, he made me realise that the true unit of data isn’t bytes or volume, it’s shelving length. Specifically, if you wrote all your data to 3½″ floppy disks, how much shelf space would you need to hold them all?

To help answer this critically important question, I wrote a Glitch app that calculates just that: https://howlongismydata.glitch.me/