The point is, some information created is rubbish. that can surely be deleted – not 10 years later – but actually the day after it was created.

Most other information is useful and took someone’s time and effort to create. You cant just go around willy-nilly deleting information to save space.

By that paradigm, we’d just burn up all our libraries.

I just talked to a hospital that has been in business for over 100 years. In all that time, their storage had grown to a total of 25 Terabytes. They project it to be 250 Terabytes by the end of next year. That’s tenfold growth, and it’s not because they are lazy. It’s because a) the latest generation of medical imaging machines are spitting many more images at much higher resolution and b) laws require them to keep these images archived for a very long time. By the same token, one of the web site customers we have spoken with offers a service for customers whose marketing pitch is “preserve your memories”.

The explicit promise is to keep your photos (and other things) safe forever. Again, that’s not laziness, it’s a combination of the fact that digital content now means a lot more to people, and the psychological fact that they want to keep it. It’s not laziness, it’s desire. That said, in the typical corporation, there are no doubt kajillions of PowerPoints and Word documents that are just sitting there, that no one is ever going to look at again, and which are not covered by compliance regulations – and that stuff could be deleted.
–Carter

In fact, I think the issue is that we must *delete” the data we don’t need. Most people are inherently lazy. Increasing hard disk sizes have endulged their sloth and consequently no-one deleted anything.

Imagine you had a leaky roof. Would the answer be to find more pots and pans to catch the water? No the answer is mend the roof….