Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 13:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
According to EMC, Australia and New Zealand generated 14 billion gigabytes of digital data during 2008. Are you looking after your contribution?
14 billion gigabytes is a lot of digital data.
By EMC's reckoning, that the equivalent of:
3,506,400,000 fully-loaded Apple iPods,
259,200,000 fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs,
86,400 trillion Twitter feeds [tweets?],
138,240 trillion online bank transactions, or
5 trillion digital photos.
If you want to check the company's arithmetic, be my guest. But even if any of the numbers are out, one thing's clear: it's a heck of a lot of data.
While EMC is particularly concerned about corporate data, SMEs and home users need to think about the issue too.
When John Brand, Research Director of Asia Pacific analyst firm Hydrasight, says "Now, more than ever, organisations must look at alternative strategies and tools for managing information to ensure they can meet the demands of this hyper-growth of information", ordinary people need to do the same.
The availability of cheap and capacious external hard drives means that disk-to-disk backup is affordable to almost everyone. But I'm concerned by the number of people that do a nightly or weekly clone and think that's all they need.
Disk cloning provides a relatively quick and easy way of getting back into action after a disaster. But what if the disaster strikes during the cloning process?
Or what if the house burns down? Do you rotate hard drives off-site (eg, to the office or a friend's home)?
How do you look after your data? Join the discussion after reading page 2.
