How much information does your typical book hold? If you haven’t read it yet, go back and read our last blog about how much data is stored in the Library of Congress, then come back here to learn more about the everyday applications of data and how much we store on a day-to-day basis.

Examining the Bit

Data is made up of bits, or strings of ones and zeros. There are 7 bits in English characters and 8 bits in a byte.

Data is stored in ones and zeros because that’s the way we have been doing it for the past 70 years. We like to use the example of a machine that has seven lights on it to represent data. If the light is on, then it’s a zero, and if it’s off, it’s a one. The combinations of lights translate into various characters, like letters, numbers, and symbols, and when strung together in large arrays, can represent vast quantities of data to be read by a system.

Magnets use this method to store data, and they are the backbone of the present-day hard drive. With spinning platters that look an awful lot like a stack of  CDs, the hard drive uses magnets to read and write data to the drive. These devices are sensitive and can detect something as tiny as something billions of times smaller than an eyelash cut into a hundred different pieces. Pretty shocking stuff.

Basically, the hard drive was crucial to the development of data storage, and it remains to this day a common staple in the office environment and even for consumer electronics. Solid state drives, or SSDs, are also quite popular, and they run using electrical charges to tiny transistors. Since they don’t rely on mechanical movements or magnets, they are the preferred choice for mobile devices, tablets, and laptops, and they can run a lot faster than your average desktop computer HDD as a result.

How Much Data is Contained On Your Smartphone?

If the US Library of Congress holds 51 Terabytes, how much does the average smartphone hold?

A typical high-end smartphone has about a quarter or half a terabyte, but if your smartphone has a Micro SD card slot, you could potentially expand its storage by an entire terabyte. That is about a 50th of the Library of Congress, or over a million books. It’s pretty shocking, considering how small those little guys are.

Here are just a couple of ways you can use a 1 Terabyte Micro SD card:

• 200,000 songs
• 250 full-length movies in full HD
• 6.5 million pages of PDF documents
• 250,000 photos taken with a 12 megapixel camera
• Essentially every video game from the 80s and 90s.
• Or you could store 10,000 copies of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95.

How Much Data Does Humanity Produce?

Humanity has produced 44 zettabytes as of 2020, and this would require 44 billion 1 TB Micro SD cards. This number could double by the end of this year, and by 2025, it could exceed 200 zettabytes. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Considering the fact that more than 62 percent of all people on the planet use social media, send emails, move information from one point to the next, and so on, this isn’t that surprising. With 300 billion emails sent daily and over 500 hours of YouTube content uploaded daily, data generation is not slowing down anytime soon.

Look, Data is Important

We hope that this look at data generation has made you look at your own data in a different light. Yes, new data is created all the time, but you can save a lot of time and energy by protecting the data you already store with data backup and disaster recovery solutions. Failing to do so is like doing the same work twice; there’s no reason for it, so don’t do it.

NuTech Services can be your go-to resource for data backup solutions. To learn more, contact us at 810.230.9455.

It isn’t a secret that technology has come so, so far as compared to just a short time ago. Take data, for instance. Let’s dive into why something so incredibly small is so incredibly important (and while we’re at it, how much space today’s data would take up in other formats).

What is Data?

To explain data, let’s go back to how data was stored before we had fancy-schmancy computers and smartphones and the like—in books! The typical novel contains somewhere from 60,000 to 110,000 words, with lengthier epics containing more (as you would expect). To get a sense of exactly how much data this translates to, let’s turn our attention to the typical text message, with its maximum of 160 characters, and anywhere from one to three sentences on average. English-language characters are each 7 bits, with each bit represented by a 1 or a 0. 01000001 stands in for “A,” while 01000010 stands in for “B.”

So, what does this matter? I promise, we’re getting there.

A text message can contain a total of 1120 bits of data, 1120 ones and zeroes. With 8 bits in every byte, this translates to 140 bytes per text message. 1,000,000 bytes make one Megabyte.

The average word to be found in our novel is made up of about five characters, meaning it could contain anywhere between 300,000 to 555,000 characters. Multiplying by seven for the bits that make up each character, and dividing by 8 for the bits in each byte, we have 481,250 bytes, or 0.48125 Megabytes, in our book.

Following this logic, a large book could contain about a half a Megabyte of information…then you also have to consider metadata, the cover, and the other assorted information an ebook would contain, which means it’ll be about one Megabyte in size. This is added to further by any images or illustrations.

How Much Data Can Be Found in a Library?

Okay, so because libraries often hold books that are far larger than the average novel—textbooks, reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like—some files will be much, much larger than a Megabyte, while others could very well be much smaller. For simplicity, let’s assume that the average book in our hypothetical library equals one Megabyte.

The typical library generally holds between 5,000 and 500,000 books, although some hold millions. The United States Library of Congress, for instance, has over 51 million books, 25 million manuscripts, and millions of other items in its massive collection. Again, to keep things simple, let’s omit everything but the text in each of the 51 million books and calculate the data stored within.

51 million Megabytes equals about 51 thousand Gigabytes, which then converts to 51 Terabytes. Many PCs contain 1 to 2 Terabyte drives, so the entire book collection of the Library of Congress could be contained on about 25 home computers. Crazy, when you think about it.

Of course, we don’t currently have mobile devices with this kind of capacity, but who knows what the future will hold.

It’s also important to acknowledge that we only calculated based on the text alone. If each book was scanned in as images, you could expect the total per book to be closer to 8 Megabytes, with a need for 408 Terabytes to hold the Library of Congress. That would take far more than a room of workstations to contain.

Stay Tuned for the Data Your Organization Handles

Next time around, we’ll discuss how much data the average human being generates, in addition to what is stored in your business each day. Make sure you check back so you don’t miss it!