An all-porn archive for the ages

[bowlinggreen]

After reading a comment in a bumped thread, I was led to wonder, not for the first time, how much disk space it would take to store ALL the porn, movies and pictures, that have ever been produced and that still survive. Just storing magazines archived as PDF would take a huge amount, you'd be looking at gigabytes for any magazine with a decent run of issues. Movies would be the huge space hog, of course, but modern picture sets can be quite large as well, running over 200mb and up for the big hi-res 500px an over images. A few hundred of these sets and you've gobbled a fair chunk out of a 1TB HD already.

I did some googling, and the articles I have seen seem mostly concerned with bandwidth porn stats, not actual storage requirements, though it is clear that a lots of video sites must have hundreds of terabytes of stuff on their servers.

So, anyone seen any more accurate data on this question? I am thinking you would measure the total in exabytes.

Which leads to the question of long term storage. I've seen one company making special 100GB Blu-Ray type discs for long term storage, but that wouldn't cut it. I think you would need a cheap, long lived 1TB removable media type medium, disc or perma-memory chip array, just for starters.

[seany65]

You have to consider the fact that there is ever more porn being produced, so any idea of a particular size for storage is out of the window.

Then you have to remember that technology keeps moving on and todays tech. has trouble reading stuff stored on old technology, and that's likley to happen again and again in the future.

The only storage method we don't have trouble reading due to change in technology is printed images/writing.

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by seany65

The only storage method we don't have trouble reading due to change in technology is printed images/writing.

As long as the pages aren't stuck together....

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by seany65

You have to consider the fact that there is ever more porn being produced, so any idea of a particular size for storage is out of the window.

Then you have to remember that technology keeps moving on and todays tech. has trouble reading stuff stored on old technology, and that's likley to happen again and again in the future.

The only storage method we don't have trouble reading due to change in technology is printed images/writing.

I am sure many terabytes of new porn are produced each year. But there has been a quantum jump in the amount of digital porn produced each year now, as opposed to say, what was produced in 1998.

I hope there is a quantum increase in storage technology down the line. If we could jump from a 25GB Blu-Ray disc to a 1TB removable storage media that costs only a few bucks a pop that would be a major jump forward. A couple hundred of these would store a lifetime supply of porn.

I wouldn't count on magazine pages standing up over the long haul either. And a JPG is a JPG, lasts forever, stores images and pictures of text quite well in hi-resolution, I am sure there will always be a way to read these. You can always create a tool to read an "obsolete file format". But you can't reconstruct a paper centerfold that has disintegrated from age.

[9876543210]

Man, how far we've come in the last 30 years or so. Anybody else remember the 80's when there were no hard drives? Storage was on 5 1/4 in floppy drives that only held 720 kilobytes? Then 3 1/2 drives were the HUGE improvement and held 1.5 Megabytes? And then, OH MY GOD, a real hard drive that held maybe four to ten Megabytes?

And now we're talking about terabytes and exobytes. Methinks things have changed a little bit in the last few years.

[maildude]

Just to put it into perspective, I have a 2 terabyte HD which I use to store downloaded (NON porn) movies. I have approx 300 gigs still available. There are more than 2300 movies on it of various qualities...some a gig in size, others less than 500 megs. On average probably around 6-700 megs per movie. ALL video.

[a435843]

I've tried to break it down into an organized estimate:

Average Vintage Playboy PDF = 100 MB
One Year's Worth = 1.2 GB
1950's: only Playboy with maybe a dozen "stag" magazines? = 15 GB * 10 = 150 GB
1960's: Playboy, some Penthouse, still a lot of older magazines, total for the decade = 200 GB
So far 350 GB
1970's: Huge expansion, Hustler, etc., several dozen porn mags available in US alone, total savings for the decade, just of the ones available = 1 TB about
1980's: Glory years for print, similar to the 1970's but a little larger = 1.25 TB
Total so far 2.6 TB
1990's: Little bigger than the 80's = 1.5 TB
2000's & 2010's: crash in print, probably as much as the 90's including up to 2016 = 1.5 TB
Total for all magazines = 5.6 TB

Movies, assuming the average listed previously of an average of 650 MB per movie:
there was a saying about the porn business during the 80's & 90's, that said there was always about 10,000 releases a year, which is still true, but with at least that much extra in digital only downloads, so to break down, assuming that all of it was able to be digitized:
Prior to 1970, just stag films & loops, all short, maybe the equivalent of 1,000 movie releases, but that's a guess = 650 GB
1970's: Big explosion in porn, but not yet to the 10,000 releases a year figure, maybe 2,500, given that they were to theaters, not to video = round to 1.7 TB
For the decade, 17 TB
1980's & 1990's: 200,000 releases, according to the popular, and actually reasonable estimate, total for those 20 years = 130 TB
So far 147 TB
2000's & 2010's: at approximately 20,000 releases a year (with digital-only, downloadable "scenes"), 320,000 movie-length releases during this century
Then, you have to account for larger sizes (DVD & digital downloads), which would probably average to 1.25 GB per movie-length release equivalent over time, so...
This obliterates the previous estimates, totaling a whopping 400 TB
Total for all porn for all time: 553 TB

So, if you have a 1 Petabyte drive handy, then you're ready to go!

[bowlinggreen]

How many "special editions" has Playboy put out over the years, though? Special editions would run up your PDF bytes a bit. Also, I am thinking that instead of storing magazines as a PDF, a truly good archive would store each magazine page as a hi-res JPG at 300dpi, which would really jack up the storage requirements.

You also didn't say anything about modern hi-res picture sets. There are tons of models doing just the "erotic" sets now, and these START at around 2000x3000px and go up from there. I've seen some sets with images having as their largest dimension 10000px. That's big. A popular model with 50-100 sets is going to eat up gigabytes of HD space.

Movies... hmmm. A lot of old digital clips were done at small sizes, I wonder if these can ever be redone in a higher resolution? I have no idea about the technology used to convert actual films to digital format, but could these old movies ever be rereleased in a higher-res digital format?

Anyway, I think we would still be looking at petabytes for a truly all encompassing porn archive, with a steadily increasing storage capacity needed each year, as porn releases of all types (pics and movies) will continue to grow at an accelerating rate.

Originally Posted by 9876543210

Man, how far we've come in the last 30 years or so. Anybody else remember the 80's when there were no hard drives? Storage was on 5 1/4 in floppy drives that only held 720 kilobytes? Then 3 1/2 drives were the HUGE improvement and held 1.5 Megabytes? And then, OH MY GOD, a real hard drive that held maybe four to ten Megabytes?

And now we're talking about terabytes and exobytes. Methinks things have changed a little bit in the last few years.

I remember when I got my first CD burner, burned like 300 MB of pics and a few movie clips onto a CD and thought "damn, this is really the s**t!"
Boy, do times change fast...

[a435843]

I had forgotten about "private" and specialty/fetish sites, though I was including PB SE's as part of the print boom of the 70's, 80's, and early 90's...a lot of those sites existed in the early 2000's though, so video sizes were very small. Also, while there are a ton of sites that have existed, most of them are small, or out of business. Even if you include photosets, the output of the major studios & megasites still will outsize this small output, so it can't be more than the 400 TB previously derived, perhaps 200-250 TB. So, I think your grand total is under 1 PB, around 750-800 TB total, as a maximum. Of course, this is a moot debate , literally, plus at least two-thirds (as a guess) of all porn ever made is completely lost, and not eligible for digitization at any size.

[bowlinggreen]

I suppose I WAS thinking about all of that "lost" porn when I was thinking about a total archive. What a waste.

After I finish inventing a 1TB mini disc technology with 500mbps writing speed to store it, I shall invent a time machine, and go get all of that "lost" porn...

If you think about, in a sense we have even "lost" those great models from the later times, as they will never do any 150x hi-res picture sets. We will never see Gail McKenna in 2000*3000 doing her workout in legwarmers, or Marina Larsen in a giant set showing everything she's got from all angles, or... *GULP* Lauren Michelle Hill at 5000px and 300dpi exercising on her gymnastics mat in her fuzzy little purple thingie... and legwarmers...

Makes you want to cry...

Actually, that last one makes me want to have a wank...