A friend just sent me this new story from Yahoo! discussing the explosive growth of electronic data.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070305/ap_on_hi_te/information_explosion_2

I’m not sure people realize how much of a problem this could be. Currently, historians have to search the earth for the slightest bit of data. Take for example the Ancient Egyptians. We search allover Egypt looking for tombs, cities, pottery, scrolls, etc… Even with what we find it’s not always clear what it means. Science has made this easier, but it’s still not an easy task.

Think ahead to the future. With googols upon googols of pieces of information. How do they determine what’s important and what’s not. How do they determine what’s factual, and what’s a hoax?

Combine this with all of the new governmental regulations forcing companies to hold onto data for years, sometimes decades, it becomes hard to delete old data. Where does it end?

What can curb this? Content-Addressable Storage? Archiving? Something new?