An estimated 295 exabytes of digital information is stored around the globe. Some of it’s on digital tapes, most of it’s on hard drives. If you turned that information into physical books, says Dr. Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California, you could cover the entire landmass of the United States and China 3 books deep. Wrap you mind around it another way, explains Hilbert and his fellow researchers, and the world’s stored information is “315 times the number of grains of sand in the world [but] less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.” Image: Detail from infographic created by data backup service Mozy via ReadWriteWeb.

An estimated 295 exabytes of digital information is stored around the globe. Some of it’s on digital tapes, most of it’s on hard drives.

If you turned that information into physical books, says Dr. Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California, you could cover the entire landmass of the United States and China 3 books deep.

Wrap you mind around it another way, explains Hilbert and his fellow researchers, and the world’s stored information is “315 times the number of grains of sand in the world [but] less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.”

Image: Detail from infographic created by data backup service Mozy via ReadWriteWeb.

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    But how thick are the books?
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    Cloud storage to the rescue
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    Wow!
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