Proof, if it were needed, that we're experiencing a data explosion has come as a university boffin has concluded that the amount of information currently in existence adds up to a whopping 295 exabytes.
If that doesn't sound very much, think again. One exabyte is equal to one million terabytes. That's a whole lot of data.
The number was reached during a study by University of Southern California student Martin Hilbert. It estimated there was that volume of data in 2007, so today's figure could actually be somewhat higher.
"Compared to nature, we are but humble apprentices. However, while the natural world is mind-boggling in its size, it remains fairly constant," he said. "In contrast, the world's technological information processing capacities are growing at exponential rates."
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"If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in three layers of books," Hilbert told the BBC's Science in Action.
"The Human DNA in one single body can store around 300 times more information than we store in all our technological devices."
You would need 1.2 billion average hard drives to store 295 exabytes of data, according to the BBC report.
