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Comment by gehwartzen | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity how do you guys mentally interpret the data size when reading about a hack/leak story? 45GB? Do you think 10s of millions of text files? A few DVD rips? a server backup?

It seems so useless but is always portrayed as the "wow look at that number!" part of any leak/hack story

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At one Very Corporate job I had, there was a file share that somehow had never been culled, had a bunch of coworkers (current and previous) vacation photos, even a couple episodes of seinfield and I think the movie Die Hard. This was pre-snowden and the ripped videos were very pre-snowden. This share was like 8 or 9gb. Two or three .ISOs from a POC (proof of concept) with a vendor could easily push it over 16gb. If they compromised the share the marketing department kept their 2006 era .wma files of the company team building activity from That One Time it might result in not a lot of actual text files. I've had my gmail account for almost as long as you've been able to have one (almost 19 years?) and I've only managed to accrue 17GB in that time.

Comparing my personal email account with my work email account, the latter has a lot more 'waste'. An email for every meeting, daily office grumblings, JIRA spam, CI spam, etc. And most of these also apply to aerospace engineers. 45 GB is nothing.

"three times my Gmail inbox accumulated in about 20 years"

4x my current inbox, accumulated over 2 years since I moved providers.

45GB and a a lot of it's just text. If it includes documents, it could be next to nothing.

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