@generalising@mastodon.flooey.org
I got sucked into running the numbers on that "delete emails to save water" thing. Best estimates I can find are that live datacentre storage in the UK has a median water usage of ~80ml/GB/year. So a terabyte of cloud storage consumes 80 litres a year.
Network losses from leaks are on the order of 10-15,000 litres per person per year.
Glad we can see the culprit is definitely old forwarded cat photos.
If you cut your daily shower by half a second you'll save enough water for a few hundred GB of ongoing storage. Buying one less t-shirt a year saves 20 TB worth of water. Not having a garden sprinkler in the summer is pushing towards the water usage of a whole PB of drives.
There are things we do with lower water impact than "file emails", but it's hard to imagine what they are.
DEFRA are claiming some exciting numbers - "datacenters burned an average of 0.441 liters of freshwater per kilowatt ... deleting 1,000 emails with attachments could save about 77.5 liters of water in a year" (https://www.404media.co/uk-asks-people-to-delete-emails-in-order-to-save-water-during-drought/)
Assuming a 10mb attachment on every email, their figures are implying something like 7.75 l/GB/year, or two orders of magnitude more than the ones we're looking at here. That's definitely a big gap.
@robparsons @generalising Ooh, marvellous. Now if you can just upload my consciousness to that eternal 1980s world from the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror, I'll be happy to live in cyberspace for ever more!
