A Cyber All Project: A Personal Store for Everything

Cyber All is a project to encode, store, and be able to retrieve all of a person’s information for personal and professional use. The archive includes books, CDs, correspondence (i.e. 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 – costing 160 of disk storage. Two gigabytes are expected to be added next year. Encoding, indexing, and data-management costs swamp the storage cost. One challenge is to automate the capture, search, and retrieval so that it comes close to the storage cost. It is inconceivable to think of manually managing or purging this electronic file since the storage costs are only 100. Indeed, copies are stored in 2 or 3 locations for redundancy. A second challenge is adding facilities that justify the cyberization investment. Use includes everything from retrieval of professional information to personal and family apps such as “playing” CDs, photos, and video on home computers and TV sets.