This video presents a visual representation of just how big a petabyte is ^[1]. Some of the data was taken from this infographic at Mozy.

But this information dates back to 2009, and now it’s 2013. That’s an eternity in the tech world. Places like BackBlaze ^[2] and JustCloud are already storing multiple petabytes of data, possibly into the exabyte range. In 2011, scientists estimated that the world’s data storage capacity was 295 exabytes, but again, that was two years ago.

To refresh your memory, the table below, taken from Wikipedia, gives a summary of multiples of bytes.

With recent advances in data storage technology and the continuing juggernautical (I just made that word up) rush towards ever-smaller devices and ever-greater storage density, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to see yottabyte drives before I shuffle off this mortal coil. My grandchildren will doubtless see the need for even larger data prefixes.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes of data (equivalent to one quadrillion alphabetic letters.)

[2] You can read an interesting article about what BackBlaze did to be able to keep adding 50 terabytes of data per day to its cloud storage, even in the midst of the hard drive shortage brought about by flooding in Thailand. The video below gives you an idea of the backbending and hoop-jumping that was necessary to keep the pipeline open.