161 exabytes and growing

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 March 2007 01:51

Business IT - Technology

We all know that we are generating a lot of data between us, and various claims are made about how long it takes for the world's data to double. But how much data actually exists? Storage vendor EMC asked IDC researchers to produce an estimate.

The headline figure was 161 exabytes (161 billion gigabytes). To put that into perspective, you'd need over two billion of Apple's most capacious iPods to store it all. If that doesn't scare you, the figure is expected to grow to 988 exabytes by 2010.

These numbers are just for digital data, but copies are included - so when someone creates a short video clip, that's (say) 10M. When they upload it to YouTube, that's another 10M. And when a million people watch it, chalk up another 10 million megabytes.

Images of various kinds - photos, videos, TV, medical scans and so on - are the major contributors to this growth, but VoIP and other audio applications are contributing, not to mention the continuing flood of email.

"[T]he real grown is in camcorder usage... and digital surveillance cameras," the report notes. The number of camcorder minutes is expected to double by 2010, while surveillance systems are switching from analogue to digital and the number of cameras is increasing.

IDC's finding that the amount of digital information is set to exceed the available storage might sound alarming or perhaps impossible, but much of the data is transient - few YouTube downloads are stored, and who keeps the 90 percent or so of emails that are spam? (IDC estimates that even if you leave out spam, email accounted for six exabytes - that's three percent - of digital data in 2006.)