In 21 years of electronic storage capability, humanity has accumulated one massively cluttered closetful of data, and a new study takes a crack at quantifying it. The yield from billions of people saving documents, images and other files on hard drives, floppy disks, microfilm, tapes and other media may be more than 295 exabytes, researchers from the University of Southern California estimate.
An exabyte is one billion gigabytes, or one million terabytes.
Broadcasting Zettabytes
In the study, to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Science and previewed online, researchers looked at a combination of some 60 digital and analog devices. They concluded that between 1986, when the level of paper-based storage began to decline, and 2007, worldwide computing capacity grew 58 percent a year — 10 times faster than the U.S. gross domestic product. In the same period, telecommunications grew 28 percent annually and storage capacity grew 23 percent a year.
They considered 2002 the beginning of the digital age because it’s the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook analog capacity. As of 2007, almost 94 percent of stored data is in digital form, the study says.
The scientists looked at unsaved data, too, and found that in 2007, almost two zettabytes of information was broadcast via TV, GPS and other devices, the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day read by every human on the planet. A zettabyte is one billion terrabytes.
That same year, humans exchanged 65 exabytes of information through two-way communications, including cell phones, the equivalent of six newspapers every day for everyone on earth, and that was when the smartphone revolution was just warming up.
Too Much Information?
But all the electronic clutter may not be a good thing, creating an exponentially growing wasteland of data that will never be retrieved.
“The enormous capacity of storage allows a person to carry…