With the advent of digital products like social networking, phones, cameras, video, camcorders to name but a few, storage is now becoming much more of an issue than ever before.

Photo: Reuters

It was recently shown in the Telegraph that the world’s growth last year was an astonishing 62% against the previous year. Which in layman’s terms equates to all the information being held on 75 billion Apple iPads which is by far no means feat. I am also sure Apple would be more than happy with that amount of iPad sales too  ;-))

With this kind of explosion in digital files, a new unit of measurement had to be created to allow for this growth. So without further a due, I announce the ‘zettabyte’!!  Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes – a petabyte represents a million gigabytes. But is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year.Now just to confuse you even more, one zettabyte is equal to one million terabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes – either way, it is a lot of memory that is being used!!

Now the really scary part of the survey, conducted by EMC, is that the digital universe is expected to increase by a factor of 44 over the next decade so now doubt we will expect a few more new names by then.

Everything being digital has the tendency to be lost, deleted or hardware breaks down so on that thought, there is one last thing I would like to add – backup backup backup!!!!!!!