Article appeared on telegraph.co.uk
Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes - which each represent a million gigabytes - but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year.
One zettabyte is equal to one million petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes.
The current size of the world’s digital content is equivalent to all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, or the amount that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on the microblogging site Twitter constantly for a century.
The rapid growth of the “digital universe” has been caused by the explosion of social networking, online video, digital photography and mobile phones.
Around 70 per cent of the world’s digital content is generated by individuals, but it is stored by companies on content-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube.
