Remember when a gigabyte seemed gargantuan? The Telegraph
UK reports that the total amount of digital information we humans have created will surpass the measure of the petabyte this year and take us into the era of the zettabyte, which is equivalent to 1 million petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Zettabyte is a new term created to accomodate the exponential increase of data creation, inspired by social networking, image, and video files, and the wealth of new kinds of devices on which bytes can be stored. The Telegraph reports that IDC, which released the new figures, had first estimated the world’s digital output in 2007 to be at 161,000 petabytes; in the next ten years it expects the digital universe to expand by a factor of 44.
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