The myth of the paperless office.

The statistics are music to the ears of data-storage companies but a little scary for those who have to manage, organize, and retrieve information:

In 2002, humans stored about 5 exabytes of new information on paper, film, optical, or magnetic media--a number that doubled in the past three year's. One exabyte is the equivalent of 1 billion gigabytes (most PCs today come with 40- to 100-gigabyte hard drives). Five exabytes, according to the New York Times, are equal to the sum of every word ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time.

That is a 30 percent increase in stored information since 1999, the last time the global study "How Much Information?" was conducted by the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. The information area with the biggest percentage increase in data was, unsurprisingly, hard disk drives. The study found the amount of stored information on these increasingly high-capacity storage media increased by up to 114 percent from 1999.

According to the study, magnetic storage is by far the preferred medium for storing information and is the fastest growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling each year. It is also rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage, perhaps because the cost of magnetic storage is dropping rapidly. As of fall 2000, a gigabyte of storage cost less than $10, and experts predict that this price will drop to $1 by 2005.

The study also deflated dreams of a paperless office. To wit, the amount of information stored on paper, including books, journals, and office documents, increased to 43 percent in 2002 compared to 1999.

Some of the survey's other interesting findings include:

* The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information annually--roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth.

* Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003 percent of the total.

* Soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information.

* Original documents created by office workers comprise more than 80 percent of all paper documents.

* Digital information production is the largest and most rapidly growing. Optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year.

* The United States produces about 25 percent of all textual information and at least half the content stored on magnetic media.

* In 2000, the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages and is growing at a rate of 100 percent per year.

* About 500 times as much e-mail is being produced annually as the stock of Web pages. About 610 billion e-mails are sent each year, compared to 2.1 billion static Web pages.

The complete survey results are available at www.sims.berkeley.edu/ research/projects/how-much-info/summary /html.

Worldwide production of original content, stored digitally using
standard compression methods (in terabytes circa 1999)

Storage  Type of Content     Terabytes/Year,  Terabytes/Year,   Growth
Medium                        Upper Estimate   Lower Estimate  Rate, %

         Books                             8                1        2
         Newspaper                        25                2       -2
Paper    Periodicals                      12                1        2
         Office documents                195               19        2
         Subtotal                        240               23
         Photographs                 410,000           41,000        5
Film     Cinema                           16               16        3
         X-Rays                       17,200           17,200        2
         Subtotal                    427,216           58,216
         Music CDs                        58                6        3
Optical  Data CDs                          3                3        2
         DVDs                             22               22       10
         Subtotal                         83               31
         Camcorder Tape              300,000          300,000        5
         PC Disk Drives              766,000            7,660      100
         Department Servers          460,000          161,000      100
         Enterprise Servers          167,000          108,550      100
         Subtotal                  1,693,000          577,210
Total                              2,120,539          635,480       50

Source: UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems