281 exabytes of data created in 2007

I typed the title for this post into Windows Live Writer, and a red squiggly appeared under the word “exabytes”. I just added it to the dictionary, but I can’t help but think that it’ll be in there by default before long.

Either it takes three months to crunch the data or March is just the unofficial “how much did we create last year” month, because researchers at IDC have once again figured out how many bits and bytes of data were created in 2007. You’ll recall that in March of last year, they estimated the figure for 2006 to be 161 exabytes. For 2007, that number nearly doubled, to 281 exabytes (which is 281 billion gigabytes):

IDC attributes accelerated growth to the increasing popularity of digital television and cameras that rely on digital storage. Major drivers of digital content growth include surveillance, social networking, and cloud computing. Visual content like images and video account for the largest portion of the digital universe. According to IDC, there are now over a billion digital cameras and camera phones in the world and only ten percent of photos are captured on regular film.

This is obviously a very inexact science, but I suspect their estimates become more accurate with experience.

Interestingly, this is the first time that we’ve created more data than we have room to store (though one wonders if that’s simply due to a lack of historical data than anything else).

Read: ars technica