Believe it or not, there is currently more data zipping around you, over wires, the air, on discs and thumb drives, than there is actual permanent storage space to hold all of it.  Thankfully, not everything is captured, and we do prune our digital archives from time to time. 

IDC released a report recently detailing its estimates of how much digital content has been created.  This includes photos, music, IMs, email, documents, videos, applications etc.  The estimate also accounts for each file getting copied an estimated three times.  The total they came up with?  161 exabytes.

To put that in perspective,  1 exabyte is 1,073,741,924 gigabytes.  The average computer hard drive now holds somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 gigabytes.  A single exabyte would require more than 5.3 million of those drives.  161 exabytes would require around 864 million hard drives to store.

An easier to visualize comparison would be to create twelve stacks of books.  That reach from the Earth to the Sun.  That's how much data we're talking about here.

Read more on what this number means, and how it was calculated at Wired.