There is virtually an infinite amount of data at this very moment. To attempt comprehending the vastness of it is akin to thinking about where the universe reaches its limits (perhaps it isn’t as vast as the universe, but really vast nevertheless). And like the latter, it is ever-expanding.

We have become increasingly reliant on smartphones for our daily needs. Even if we don’t use cloud services heavily, we still do make use of them in various forms such as media storage, gaming, and even social media. Almost everything has an online backup of sorts and it seldom is the case that your SD card going bust = your losing all your data. There is just so, so much of it, collectively speaking, that one can’t simply think of it without getting lost in its vastness.

And this is just about personal data. There’s a ton of dumping that takes place in various corporations - not only the code or media that go into making products, but also data related to employees (ERP stuff). Over and above that, there’s a bunch of data “snapshots” that are stored periodically as backups just in case anything goes wrong (could be a bunch of things, from hacking attacks to rogue students to external human errors). There is no limit to what is possible, as stated by Murphy.

And of course, humanity being humanity, there’s always some meta stuff around the corner.

Back to the point. Would it be okay if one day YouTube decides to remove some videos because it’s run out of space? If we consider that someone’s data, once it comes into being, stays as their data forever - does it mean that no online cloud-backed storage provider can get rid of anything on their servers - and as a corollary, that there will necessarily have to be infinite space in/on the cloud to accommodate our ever-increasing cloud needs? Or will there come a time when we cannot have more memory addresses and will have to resort to the good old magnetic tapes? It’s something to ponder upon.

And this is all excluding the buzz about the Internet of things. It’s quite an achievement we have, getting to such a stage in the first place. I really don’t know how much space server farms generally must cover, in terms of square kilometres. Or for that matter, a real estimate of how much space the internet actually consumes in terms of bits.

Or even the number of zeros in that figure.