h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm curious... How much 'cyberspace' does h2g2 take up. How many gigabytes or terrabytes are we occupying? It's bound to be alot.

Even though it is mostly just text and text takes up little space compared with graphics and video, with all the entries, edited and not, all the threads and posts. I think we recently passed the 1 million THREAD mark. That's a lot of text.

But even with out all the posts, how much space does the guide itself take up with just the entries? Even just the edited guide entries? Would it fit on a DVD?

How many to hold the entire h2g2?

I'm afraid to think how large all of DNA is now.

How big is h2g2?

It's big. Like, really big.

Can't remember rest of quote...

RF

how long is a piece of string

You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. -DNA

There you are! I knew someone would come to the rescue!

Actually, as h2g2 is about "Life, the Universe, and Everything" surely, in a deeply philosophical way that I don't completely understand, the internet is in fact a part of h2g2, not the other way round?

RF

So, how many DVD's would it take to hold all of "life, the Universe and Everything"?

...


...


...


42?

I have absolutely no idea but I'm dying to find out!
Nerd42

Jimster must know. We need to lure him here somehow.

This isn't the first time that this question has been asked, and the answer is... surprisingly small. I don't recall what the answer was last time but I think it was in the range of a relatively small hard drive, and since the conversation search is disabled there's no easy way to look for the thread, but no doubt someone who knows will come along eventually.

*makes noise like a hamster in distress*

That should do it.

Noggin

why is that hamster wearing a dress?

I'm used to very big archives... That's part of what I do. I'm putting NASA astronaut images on DVD. I can put 77 of my larger scans on one disc. It builds up quickly. With text files like what most of h2g2 is it is much 'smaller' data. But when you start looking around... it just seems so huge.

Should we start a pool to see who can come closest guessing?


I'm going to take a very large guess and say about 189 meg.

It's a compleatly arbitrary number I got by guessing 42 DVDs * 4.5 megs/DVD. And when I saw that number, I thought, well 189 gig is way too much... let's guess 189 meg instead.

It's undoubtedly wrong, but it's a guess.

I'll go with 2.3 giga. Just because.

here's my guess: (completely random) 42GB (not!)
Nerd42

Jim Lynn one time popped the whole lot onto a laptop so he could take it away and fiddle with it.

>>in the range of a relatively small hard drive<<

Just how small is that these days? My old laptop came with a 3GB harddrive. My new laptop has an 80GB one.



Someone could download h2g2 to see how big it is

A while back I went through a couple of very long backlogs just to see what they were about... Cancel and several of the threads Leks were on. They took weeks to go through. And those were relatively short threads compared to stuff like Thingites and such. Can you even imagine how long it would take to read all the threads up to right now on this one website?

(Granted a lot of it would be along the lines of "what colour are your shoes?" and such tripe).

And I wouldn't be surprised to find it fits on one disc.

This place is in' huge!

And yet it will fit in one laptop? Wow.

i gotta 80GB hd in my desktop plus I just got a 150GB or something external drive that's just for backup purposes.
Nerd42

My first modern (pentium type) desktop came with a 412Mb harddrive.

I can get a lot more than that on a USB key fob now.

Some Italic is bound to wander by here sooner or later and let us know if we could fit h2g2 on a key fob.


I wonder how much those memory cubes in the h2g2 movie would hold?

They're bound to be able to hold more than just some space coordinates?

Would h2g2 fit in one of those? I'd have to think so. Think one would hold the entire current internet?

Ok... My questions are getting sillier now.

Oh... btw... I think there may be more than 11 million posts now. (11675809+)