Parkinson’s Law
Anyone working with a computer, whether a PC or a server, has experienced that no matter how much storage space you have, you end up by filling it up with data. Parkinson condensed this empirical observation in his law: data expands to fill all the available storage space.
The more available space there is, the more data gets into it: the collapse of traffic in motorways, no matter how they grow, is also true here.
A few years ago, just to have two Mb of hard drive would have seemed a luxury, a treasure to properly manage. It is now common to start having a record of several terabytes at home. Small wonder that they end up full irrespective of their original size.
Someone has suggested that any os uf uses twice the memory every eighteen months (sort of an extension of Moore’s Law to disk space). Our ever growing appetite for space never stops. Fortunately enough, the amount of memory you get for the same price doubles faster every twelve months.
A broader definition of this law can be found in Wikipedia:
«work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion».
From my book: Infoxicacion
