GB 17

I was transferring some data today, a couple of gigabytes from my backup drive to my laptop. That got me to thinking about data.

GB stands for gigabyte. A gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. A byte is a string of 8 bits. Each bit is a digital 1 or a 0. So a gigabyte is 8,000,000,000 bits of information.

That got me to wondering how much data Google handles every day. Google handles much more than 20 petabytes of data per day. That is 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes a day and that was the figure back in 2008.

That made me wonder how much data does Google hold in the cloud. That is estimated at 15 exabytes, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data and Google is not the largest storer of internet data.

The average personal computer sold today has a 500 gigabyte hard drive, which is far more than the average owner will ever use. The 15 exabytes mentioned above would be storage the equal of 30,000,000 personal computers.

We probably all have heard what goes out over the internet stays there forever. I wonder how much of that data is pictures of a hot dog someone is about to eat or pictures of pets?

I have everything I have written day after day in the last 20 years on my backup drive and that is less than 2 gigabytes, while the still pictures I have taken at low resolution over that time take up 24 gigabytes. I have about 200 old CDs in my collection and all of that data is just over 80 gigabytes.

I hope if you have read this far the information here gives you a little perspective on data in our modern world. Incidentally, all of that data is flying around us in the form of radio waves and that does not even take into the fact that TV signals are added onto that.