The internet is currently estimated to consist of about 1 million petabytes of data . No hard figures exist on this , but I ' m looking at Cisco ' s estimates . Their data also show this estimate growing at about 22 % annually , so if this has been consistent for the history of the internet we can forecast backwards 106 petabytes 1 . 22 n petabytes 106 1 . 22 nlog 106 log 1 . 22 n 6 log 10 n log 1 . 22 n 6 log 1 . 22 n 69 . 5 yearsWhich is clearly nonsense so let ' s work from the other end of the data . The World Wide Web is today only 25 years old . If we assume a constant growth from day 1 and start conservatively with about 1 GB of data we can work out the point at which it would have grown to 1 petabyteX 25 GB 1018 GB X 101825 X 5 . 2481 So an annual growth rate of ~ 525 %! With this modified growth rate we can work out our modified n n 6 log 101825 n 61825 62518 n 8 . 3 years since the internet would fit on a human brain .