How much data per year?
An interesting piece in the Guardian today… which answers the question: How much digital data is being produced worldwide per year?
The answer may surprise you. It did me!
The analysis included data in emails, blogs, mobile phone calls, photos and digital TV, and would, apparently, ‘fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun’. That is a lot…. basically, as the article states, that is 161 billion gigabytes (161 exabytes), or put another way, 161 billion iPod Shuffles.
You can see how this has come about. If I think of it from my own computing perspective, in 1988 I had a 20 MB hard-drive in my computer and never thought I would fill it. Today I have 90 GB disk in a laptop, with a 250 GB backup drive, and I keep running out of disk space. Look at how digital cameras have changed. Back in 1998 I used digital camera with about 300,000 pixel, my latest camera (Sony Cyber-Shot W70) has 7.2 million pixels, photos have gone from ~80 kb to ~3 MB in just under 10 years (around 40x increase). Makes you think…
Sony Cyber-Shot W70 – 7.2 million pixels (Amazon Link)
Read the full story in the Guardian
