How Much Data Is There In The World?

If you’re  roughly  the same age as me, you might remember buying a laptop in the 2000s  that came with around  40 G B of data. ‘Wow, that’s a  LOT  of storage!’ we all thought at the time. Now, even the most basic smartphone comes with around 30 GB of data   storage , while a top-of-the-range iPhone   has more than 500GB. But the days of being impressed by gigabytes are long gone. As the amount of data in the world has increased   exponentially, we’ve had to come up with new, unfamiliar   words to describe data in numerical form.   So long, gigabytes.   These days, we’re talking terabytes, petabytes , exabytes   and zettabytes. You lost me at petabyte… A   terabyte is just over 1,000 gigabytes, and is a label most of us are familiar with   from our home   computers . Scaling up from there, a   petabyte is   just over 1,000 terabytes. That may be far beyond the kind of   data   storage th...