Storing Bush’s Brain

Storage woes are hitting home in the most surprising places. The New York Times recently reported that an emergency plan has to be implemented to deal with the massive amount of electronic information that the Bush White House produced over the last eight years–about 100 terabytes of information, which was 50 times the amount of the Clinton White House. Someone should’ve told the President to stop forwarding all those funny cat photos.

Under federal law, every last byte of correspondence must be stored by the National Archives, which, like so many other companies and institutions, is struggling to manage the rising tide of data. The problem has reached crisis proportions, says TechWeb. And of course when it comes to presidential data, this is just the beginning. With an incoming president who has been vigorously fighting to retain his Blackberry since the day he was elected, the Obama administration’s data footprint is sure to be petabytes in magnitude larger still.