A recent commentary in The Economist states that, according to one estimate, “mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes.” “The Data Deluge,” The Economist, Feb. 25, 2010. To put these numbers in perspective, all the catalogued books in the Library of Congress total 15 terabytes, while five petabytes (approximately 5,000 terabytes) is roughly equal to all the letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service in 2010. “All too much: Monstrous amounts of data,” The Economist, Feb. 25, 2010.
An exabyte is about 1,000 petabytes, and is estimated to be equal to all the printed material in the world. Not surprisingly, the exponential growth of information results in challenges to the justice system, since evaluating electronically stored information (ESI) is often one of the most important facets of litigation. “The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search & Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery,” 8 Sedona Conf. J. 189, 194 (2007).
