The United States arguably has some of the largest paper archives in the world. The US National Archives maintains paper storage in some 40+ facilities around the country, many underground in natural caves.

This video shows some of those faciities and describes operations and capabilities:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VczfZAXPqnQ

https://www.archives.gov/frc/locations

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Even at the time, alternative data storage methods were being developed, noteably microfiche (microphotography), which reduces documents to about 4% of their original size. The entire file would fill less than 1/4 of a single bank of cabinets at this rate, though adding and removing records would be more complicated.

There were also punch cards, which were less dense informationally (80 bytes, or about one line of effective text, per card), but could be processed automatically. These were pioneered with the 1880 US Census, by the precursor of IBM.

Similar technology, also managed by IBM, would later serve Nazi Germany in computationally assisting in its "Jewish Problem" during the Holocaust of World War II.

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So, some data storage estimates on the Czech Central Social Institution files.

Total capacity is about 27 linear km of paper storage.

There are 18 banks of 500 drawers, 25 high and 20 wide, measuring 3m in depth. Each bank of 500 is served by a single desk.

Paper stores at about 6,000 sheets/m, or 162 million pieces of paper for the entire file, at capacity. (It's probably less than this, but we're looking for max storage.)

A sheet of paper can hold about 500 words of 6 bytes each, or about 3 kB of data. Again, bureaucratic forms likely have a smaller number of fields, but we're looking for maxima.

That totals out to slightly less than 500 GB total.

In practice, the actual achieved storage is likely closer to 25 GB, assuming about 80% fill of drawers and 10% capacity per page.

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I see your open-plan office AND RAISE YOU!!!

The Central Social Institution of Prague. It’s apparently still in operation.

https://www.vintag.es/2020/01/central-social-institution-prague.html

#CentralSocialInstitution #Prague #Czechia #DataStorage #InformationManagement #KFC #DocFS #WebFS