Finding a place to efficiently store all of one ’ s digital materials . A Personal Digital Store

A Personal Digital Store C yberAll is a project to encode, store, and allow easy retrieval of all of a person’s information for personal and professional use. The archive includes books, CDs, correspondence (such as letters, memos, and email), transactions, papers, photos and albums, and video. In 2000, only 16 gigabytes are required to store all the media in my personal and professional life—at a cost of $160 for disk storage. Two gigabytes are expected to be added next year. Encoding, indexing, and data-management costs far exceed the storage expense. The challenge is to automate capture, search, and retrieval. CyberAll is a personal ontology [5] in contrast to a library [6] or Kahle’s effort to archive the Web and television channels (see www.archive. org). It is my store for documents, photos of people and computing artifacts, music, and videos as described by Bush in [2] and Gates in [4]. CyberAll also holds reference articles, clipped graphs that heretofore would be physically stored, computer manuals, and magazines. At present, books are in “atomic” form; but CyberAll will include them as they become e-books. Within the next decade personal computers will be capable of storing a terabyte of information on an individual machine. In 2000, 40GB drives costing $400 are more than adequate to hold the content for most of a professional’s lifetime reading, presentations, and audio recordings. A CD encoded at 128Kbps can be stored at a cost of $0.60. A user’s CD collection is likely to use more storage space than the user’s computer-generated and scanned paper files. The next phase of CyberAll will capture conversations, interviews, meetings, and presentations. Recording speech from one’s personal and professional lives will require over a terabyte (at 8Kbps)—but only a modest 25GB/year. Video is even more challenging. For home use, a terabyte holds 500 hours of DVD quality video and 1500 CDs, but more compression increases the capacity by a factor of at least 10. Recording a lifetime of everything seen requires 100TB. Doing this economically is still more than a decade away—it would currently cost more than $10,000 per year. But in two decades, it should cost only $100 per year and require an