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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

How many thousands of hours of video is uploaded to youtube _daily_ and stored on google servers forever?

And you are talking about logging actions of your own employees. Let's say 100kb per day per employee (these logs are pretty detailed).

100kb * 50 000 employees = 4.7Gb per day. 1740Gb per year. Probably much, much less then 1 day of youtube videos.

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It's obviously not the volume of data that is surprising. It's that they retained system message logs from a random laptop for years. They must regard this as potentially important business information. Does your company do this? Mine sure doesn't.

Data is useful for large companies - especially when you want to make data-driven decisions.

- Can we stop dispensing USB cables in the vending machines?

- Should we deploy the new Macbook Pro without classic USB ports as the new standard?

- Do our conference rooms really still need USB presentation remotes? Does anyone actually use them?

Turns out it was important business information after all.

What's interesting is that I can see these logs as being a liability as well as an asset; there's a reason most business records retention policies are about getting rid of records, not keeping them. From that perspective it's surprisingly they'd reveal the level of logging in play.

It depends. If you have the ability to use the data, it's a real advantage. It's a flood of data that most folks can't handle.

For a company at Google's scale, figuring out how to cull even a couple TB a year may cost much more in salary than the money saved. Also, it's occasionally really really useful.

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