Researchers Calculate All Digital Data
A new study that estimates how much digital information is zipping around (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there’s not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff.
The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times.
Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital information last year.
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.
The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe’s information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of that report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC’s new look.
But the Berkeley researchers had taken a different trail. They also counted non-electronic information, such as analog radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And they examined original data only, not all the times things got copied.
In comparison, the IDC numbers ballooned with the inclusion of content as it was created and as it was reproduced — for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.
Two researchers who were not involved in…
