When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico was launched in 2000, its telescope collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. By 2013, the survey’s archive contained hundreds of terabytes of data. However, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile, due to come online in 2016, will collect that quantity of data every five days.

In 2013 Google was processing more than 24 petabytes of data every day.

Facebook members upload more than 10 million new photos every hour. In addition, they click a “like” button or leave a comment nearly 3 billion times every day.

The 800 million monthly users of Google’s YouTube service upload more than an hour of video every second.

The number of messages on Twitter grows at 200 percent every year. By mid-2013 the volume exceeded 450 million tweets per day.

As recently as the year 2000, only 25 percent of the stored information in the world was digital. The other 75 percent was analog; that is, it was stored on paper, film, vinyl records, and the like. By 2013, the amount of stored information in the world was estimated to be around 1,200 exabytes, of which less than 2 percent was non-digital.