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Data explosion
Each of us sent six exabytes of e-mail last year |
May 1, 2007 |
Human beings are creating more information than ever before. Far more.
In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured and replicated worldwide was equal to 161 billion gigabytes, or 161 exabytes. If you took that information and bound it in books the size of the latest Harry Potter novel, you’d get 12 stacks of books that each stretched from the Earth to the Sun.
Computer users in 2006 shared more than one billion MP3 files over the Internet every day and snapped almost 100 billion photos using just cellphone cameras. More than 500 billion images will be captured by various devices by 2010 and the total amount of digital information generated will rise six-fold to 988 exabytes.
And from 1998 to 2006 the volume of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing. In 2006, the e-mail traffic from one person to another accounted for six exabytes of data, and that excludes spam.
These figures come from The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010, a study conducted by IDC and EMC Corp.
“The incredible growth and sheer amount of the different types of information being generated from so many different places represents more than just a worldwide information explosion,” said John Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president, IDC . “It represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analog form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it’s infinite. Organizations will need to employ ever-more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the additional information that is being generated every day.”
The study is at www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe.
One final stat: the 161 exabytes generated in 2006 total approximately three million times more information than is contained in all the books ever written.
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