Oh really? Schmidt's claim overstates reality by 5000 times and you don't care? Link is to an (awesome) online calculator showing how I arrived at this.
These are numbers incomprehensibly big. Nobody can even begin to mentally picture these in a reasonable fashion. The only part of the statement that is really important is the meaning, not the details of the numbers. That meaning is "we are creating shittons of data really really fast, faster than ever before". If you're getting hung up on the accuracy of the numbers used to express this, then you're missing the point, and I wonder why you don't have something better to do than get worked up about it...
EDIT: Furthermore, according to the "more accurate" statement form the article, we're creating 23 Exabytes in 7 days, not 5. Read it again: "_23 Exabytes_ of information was recorded and replicated in 2002. We now record and transfer _that much_ information every _7 days_."
Exactly, the entire point of the quote was to get across the absurd magnitude of growth that we're seeing in a way that anybody can understand.
If you care enough about numbers and can figure out how to say it more accurately... more power to you I guess? Doesn't change the effectiveness of the quote though.
Given a much smaller world-population during most of history, and much less information transfer (other than f2f), I think your estimate is off by at least a factor 100 (rough guess) more than Schmidt's.
Just now bothered to look at your calculator thing, since I maintain the actual numbers involved are pointless details. However...
The there was a 50x growth between now and the single year of 2002. Schmidt's quote stated 260,000X growth between now and the average of all data created in the past 5000 years.
In order to create an actual comparison of Schmidt Rate vs Real Rate, you need a 'real' number for the amount of data from recorded history until 2002, something that nobody has volunteered. Nobody is debating that Schmidt's numbers were inaccurate, and the number he provides for this is almost certainly wrong, however we don't know by how much. Extrapolating out from data from the single year of 2002 is flawed; it is foolish to think that the growth rates of data in 2002CE and 2002BCE are the same without data to suggest so.
If we accept that there has been a constant rate of growth of data creation, then your conclusion is valid.
http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=ZGF5c19zaW5jZV9oaXN0b3J5X3N0Y...