Obama's Records to be Measured in Petabytes

And you think YOU have record keeping problems!

Paul Bedard, writing in Washington Whispers, notes that the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has to copy, sort, file, and organize a huge collection of presidential records, most of which are electronic.

Acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas reveals that the Clinton administration left two terabytes of data. The agency doesn't yet have a number for the George W. Bush administration as the staff is still collecting the information. However, it is obviously a lot more than two terabytes. It's taking nearly a year longer than planned to install all the Bush records into National Archive computers.

Now the archivists are already bracing for the even more high-tech Obama records, especially if the President serves two terms. Nobody will guess the size of the yet=to-be-written records, but the assumption is that this administration will leave behind more than 100 terabytes.

For the record, one petabyte equals 1 quadrillion bytes.

Comments

[Zadruga Guy]

Dick, you wrote "for the record" that a petabyte "equals" 1 quadrillion bytes. This is NOT CORRECT, as I am sure you know very well. It _is_ approximately correct, but shouldn't a "for the record" statement be exactly correct, not just approximately correct?

For the record, 1 petabyte is 1024^5 bytes, which, written out, is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. So saying that a petabyte is a quadrillion bytes is inaccurate by over 125 billion bytes.

[Zadruga Guy]

Whoops! Make the margin of error over 125 _trillion_ bytes.