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!!!!!!!
All this data out there and yet as humans we still don’t use the full capacity of our brains!
I definitely agree with your comment about backup Mike – something that you can never have enough of!
So how do I go about backing up 1.2 zettabytes? It hurts my brain too much to even begin trying to calculate how many 1.44Mb floppies it would take to back that up, if the clock was turned back 10 years ago