While digital storage has become cheaper, the associated costs, from raw power to maintenance and from metadata to search engines, have not kept up with the proliferation of data.
Although the power required to maintain a unit of data has fallen, the cost of facilities which house the digital storage has tended to rise.
And whether it’s relevant or not, the load on the system is being magnified by practices such as multiple addressing and the attaching of large text, audio and even video files.Data proliferation has been documented as a problem for the U.S. military since August 1971, in particular regarding the excessive documentation submitted during the acquisition of major weapon systems.
This has made it very easy to dump data into secondary storage immediately after its window of usability has passed.
This masks problem that could gravely affect the profitability of businesses and the efficient functioning of health services, police and security forces, local and national governments, and many other types of organizations.