In 1986 barely one percent of stored information was digital
Within about two decades, the world flipped from storing its information mostly on paper, film and tape to storing almost all of it digitally. Around one percent of global storage capacity was digital in 1986; by 2007 the figure had reached 94 percent, and 2002 is reckoned the year digital took the lead.
Storing data simply means recording information on some medium, and almost any form of energy can do the job. Handwriting, gramophone records, magnetic tape and optical discs all qualify, and some people count DNA and RNA as well. Electronic storage is special in needing power both to write and to read. Paper can still carry machine-readable data, through barcodes or characters printed in magnetic ink, but electronic documents take up far less room.
Not every medium is meant to last. Smoke signals and skywriting fade by nature, and volatile compounds can be used deliberately so that data expires or leaves a lighter environmental footprint. A gas or the surface of a lake would count as a temporary recording medium, if it counts at all. Even art blurs the line between tool and medium, since a crayon's wax or a stick of charcoal becomes part of the surface it marks.
Measurements of the digital surge are striking. A 2003 study from UC Berkeley put the new information created in 2002 at roughly five exabytes, double the 1999 total, with 92 percent kept on magnetic media, chiefly hard drives. Nearly 18 exabytes flowed through telecommunications that year, 98 percent of it telephone calls. The International Data Corporation reckoned there were 281 exabytes of digital data in 2007, the first year production outran the world's capacity to store it.
A 2011 paper in Science traced digital storage doubling roughly every three to four years, from under three compressed exabytes in 1986 to 295 in 2007. Estimates for 2023 put yearly data generation around 120 zettabytes, sixty times the 2010 level, heading for 181 zettabytes in 2025.
Source: Data storage
