161,000,000,000 GB of data in 2006

[Melbosa]

Source: http://marketnews.ca/news_detail.asp?nid=2600

161B GB of Data Created & Copied in 2006
According to a new study conducted by IDC on behalf of information infrastructure company EMC Corporation, 161 billion gigabytes (or simply ?exabytes?) of digital information was created or copied worldwide in 2006; and this number is expected to rise six-fold to 988 billion gigabytes in 2010. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 57 per cent.

To put things in perspective, IDC notes that the digital universe equals approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written, or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun.

Broken down by category, images comprise the largest component of the digital universe, having been captured by more than one billion devices, including digital cameras, camera phones, medical scanners, and security cameras.  Images captured on digital cameras specifically exceeded 150 billion worldwide in 2006, while the number captured on cell phone hit almost 100 billion. IDC forecasts the number of images captured to reach more than 500 billion by 2010. IDC adds that camcorder usage should double in total minutes by 2010.

In terms of e-mail, traffic from one person to another (excluding spam) accounting for 6 billion gigabytes of data in 2006. The number of e-mail mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to nearly 1.6 billion in 2006; and during that same period, the number of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing.  There will be 250 million instant messaging (IM) accounts by 2010, including consumer accounts from which business IMs are sent. Today, over 60 per cent of Internet users have access to broadband circuits, either at home, at work or at school. In 2006, 1.1 billion users were on the Internet; and IDC expects this number to rise by another 500 million by 2010. In 2006, there were only 48 million people routinely using the Internet. 

The report, entitled The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010, says that nearly 70 per cent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals in 2010. Organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85 per cent of this information, in the capacity of a network, data centre, hosting site, telephone or Internet switch, or in a backup system.

"This ever-growing mass of information is putting a considerable strain on the IT infrastructures we have in place today," said Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer at EMC. "This explosive growth will change the way organizations and IT professionals do their jobs, and the way we consumers use information. Given that 85 per cent of the information created and copied will be the responsibility of organizations and businesses, we must take steps as an industry to ensure we develop flexible, reliable and secure information infrastructures to handle the deluge."

"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 of unprecedented scale," added 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. From a technology perspective, 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 complete study can be found at: www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe.

[Lazybones]

Is the total amount of data created even meaningfully or remotely accurate? Do you start counting all of the movies, audio, TV now recorded digitally?

[Tom]

Do you also count all of the coppies that are created just from transfering data around? Does that number only include "uniqe" data?

[Melbosa]

Good questions.  And cause I didn't do the research, I don't know.

[Lazybones]

Good questions.  And cause I didn't do the research, I don't know.

It wasn't a question directed at you.. It is more of a comment that the stat is interested while meaningless at the same time.

[Cova]

I would guess that it does include all of the various digital video information (the article specifically does say it includes digital camera's - I assume they didn't mention video just because there aren't that nearly as many digital camcorders out there) - and in a different article I read about this it said that they do have some calculations in there to account for duplicated data (as in they don't count duplicates).

[Melbosa]

It wasn't a question directed at you.. It is more of a comment that the stat is interested while meaningless at the same time.

I guessed that hehe.