Can there be good from the BP disaster?

Written by Brian Bailey September 08, 2010 Hits: 338 Favorites

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I have just read an interesting article related to the BP oil spill. It is not about the spill itself, but of one of the ramifications of it that is just starting and is associated with the litigation. It talks about the amount of data related to the case now that we have the Internet, facebook, twitter and many other technologies – none of which existed at the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The article estimates that there will be 1 petabyte of daya. They describe that much data this way:

If a gigabyte of data amounts to roughly a pickup truck full of books, for example, and a terabyte adds up to 1,000 such pickup trucks, the BP/Deepwater Horizon case—given its complexity, seriousness and the proliferation of electronic files involved—could cross the mind-bending petabyte threshold, Belt says. "Imagine a vast expanse, perhaps somewhere in the Mojave Desert, in which a million pickup trucks full of books cover a parking lot that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions," he writes. "That would be a petabyte of data."

So while I doubt that this will have a big impact on the disk drive industry (except that I am sure this data will be replicated hundreds of times), it could have an impact of the data search techniques that have to be developed. They are not only looking for the data that exists but also for data that may be missing. They point out:

Companies have an explicit responsibility to preserve digital information that is under their custody and control. But how far must companies go in preserving data that tends to exist only temporarily? Is "going dark" with electronic communications the same as actively shredding printed documents?

Is it just possible that some good may come out of a disaster? Even so it would clearly not be worth the expense that has been paid in lives and livelihoods.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered

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Brian Bailey