Human has always believed in storing the knowledge that they have gained so that the future generations can benefit from them and towards this end, humans have been striving since time immemorial. Our brain is the foremost storage device that we were born with and it can actually hold more data than the storage devices of present times.
During the prehistoric times the medium of data storage were fist the cave paintings which then gave way to the stone tablets. Somewhere around the 1700's came the revolution in papyrus or paper where writing down data with the help of dyes and specially made inks were the medium of storage.
During the 18th and 19th century, punch cards, filing cabinets and then the photographic film were invented and used as storage mediums which then gave way to the magnetic tape, the floppy and the compack disk thereafter and lastly through the world wide web, the cloud.