Data and information are swamping us.  So what – that’s old news, you say. But if you’re on the data service providing end at a college or university, you are only too aware of the insatiable storage demands of your clientele. The cause is simple – the handy, obvious physical restraints of the past are gone. Remember file cabinets stuffed from front to back and books piled on the floor when the shelves were filled? With the exception of true hoarders, we determined what to keep and what to discard on a rolling basis over time.

The digital world entices us with freedom from physical constraints. Much like Groundhog Day, our digital lives unfold in an endless pattern of create, acquire and save that occurs without deterrents. The cost of choosing what to keep and what to trash is much too high – it requires what is now most rare – our focused attention. So we never actually delete.  We might curate, but that only brings some things into focus; the others remain waiting in the background. Editing happens with revision histories, not wadded papers discarded in the bin. Emails marked as read continue scrolling downward into a deepening well of messages. Meanwhile your local data center struggles to satisfy the insatiable demand for storage.

Amazon announced Glacier today offering 1 GB for 1 penny per month. Lease as much as you need for a very low price. The catch – it is named appropriately. It is archive storage. If you want to retrieve something, plan on it taking hours rather than minutes.  But this seems to be a reasonable decision point that all of us could make as we confront our data – put it into the attic or leave it out in the room.