Dirty Data?

Are e-mail attachments bad for the environment? Data-storage expert Matthew Yeager thinks so. In an interview with Mother Jones, Yeager compares the greenhouse gases created from sending a 4.7 megabyte-sized email attachment to boiling a kettle of water 17.5 times. As we inch over the one zettabyte marker of stored data worldwide, that’s — well, a whole lot of kettles. Yeager argues that redundancy represents a huge share of stored data, something to consider before sending that cute bunny photo to 300 of your closest friends. [%comments]