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Digital Big Bang — 161 Exabytes In 2006

Posted by kdawson on from the had-we-but-world-enough-and-room-to-store-it dept.

An anonymous reader tips us to an AP story on a recent study of how much data we are producing. IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information. The last time anyone tried to estimate global information volume, in 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley came up with 5 exabytes. (The current study tries to account for duplicating data — on the same assumptions as the 2003 study it would have come out at 40 exabytes.) By 2010, according to IDC, we will be producing far more data than we will have room to store, closing in on a zettabyte.

1 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How many... by franksands · · Score: 5, Informative
    Since you asked:

    Oh, the equivalents! That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

    I don't have anime estimates, but I can make a Heroes analogy.a hi-def episode is more or less 700mb. Considering the first season has 23 episodes, that would make 16.1gb. So 161 exabytes would be 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) seasons of Heroes. Since the earth currenlty has around 6.6 billion people, this would mean that you would have 1 episode for each person on the planet, and all the people of China, India and the US would have a second episode. That's how big it is.

    Regarding the storage space, I call shenanigans. We already have HDD that stores terabytes. A couple years from now, MS office will require that space to be installed.