Backing Up Billions of Bytes

According to estimates presented at a National Institutes of Standards and Technology conference, the world now generates new digital information equal to the entire collection of the U.S. Library of Congress every 15 minutes. That's about five exabytes (five quintillion bytes or five billion gigabytes) a year. NIST is trying to figure out how to keep much of that data from simply disappearing, or becoming "as incomprehensible as the markings on Babylonian cuneiform tablets."