CRISISBOOM

breakingnewsworld

Facebook users take for granted just how much of their personal data is surrendered when they sign up to the site and liberally share their lives on the popular social networking platform. But for the interested user, the numbers are here. According to the S-1 filing made by Facebook in anticipation of its IPO, a whopping 104,857,600 GB of data is stored on Facebook servers at any one time.

That number was written in the SEC filing as 100 Petabytes of data, but most people of course don’t even know what a Petabyte is or how to gauge its size in relation to something else. Thanks to the fine folks over at TechCrunch though, a visual representation of the figure was created. The simplest way they found to put the number in perspective was to compare 100 Petabytes to the number of Toshiba 320 GB hard drives it would take to accommodate the overall number of bytes. Turns out in order to store 100 Petabytes of data; you would need 312,500 Toshiba hard drives.

Now some people may think Facebook is showing off, but when you really think about it, 845 million active users are bound to have lots of ‘stuff’ to share. And sharing and storage is one in the same where Facebook is concerned.

Should Facebook delete very old shared data from their servers? Let us know your thoughts below.