A lotta yotta storage

A research group estimates that the amount of digital data created and stored will reach nearly 2 zettabytes by 2011. That’s 2×10²¹ bytes.
That’s a lot of crap to store.

Well, not all of it is crap, but I’m sure a good chunk of it is crap.

From the article:

By 2011, there will be 1,800 exabytes of electronic data in existence, or 1.8 zettabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes). In fact, the number of bits stored already exceeds the estimated number of stars in the universe, IDC stated. And because data is growing by a factor of 10 every five years, by 2023 the number of stored bits will surpass Avogadro’s number, which is the number of carbon atoms in 12 grams, or 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.022 x 10^23).

Less than half of the digital data being created by individuals can be accounted for by user activities, such as photos, phone calls and e-mails. The majority of the data is made up by what IDC calls digital “shadows” &emdash; including surveillance photos, Web search histories, financial transaction journals and mailing lists.

At roughly 14 terabytes/year (and growing), I know that our department is making it’s contribution to the ‘storage economy’.

Methinks we’ll need some new prefixes soon for whatever comes after 10²⁴.

Found via Slashdot.