The Dad Question Episode

The Dad Question Episode: A Simple Question, Why Did The Internet Archive Even Happen, What Even Is All This, The Infinite Growth, What Data Really Is, The Handfuls Taken From The Ocean, Towards the Future. A simple question from my Dad forces me to explain how we got into this mess and how we're going to have to keep in it, even in the face of impossibility. The URL https://archive.org/~tracey/mrtg is not the most perfect page and not set up for easy understanding of what it's talking about, but it is the most up to date indicator of how much data is floating into the Internet Archive and how it's handling it. With an understanding and a stress that not all of the used disk space is "stuff" you can browse or necessarily related directly to Internet Archive stored items, over 60 petabytes of unique disk space has been stored by all operations and that's at least 120 petabytes of real hard drives.