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What Do 12 Terabytes-Worth of Data Look Like?

Alex •

In the ongoing $1 billion legal lawsuit between YouTube and Viacom, a federal judge has recently ordered Google to turn over records of all users and videos ever viewed on YouTube. Privacy concern aside, that's 12 terabytes of data.

Well, it sounds enormous ... but what exactly does 12 terabytes-worth of information look like? To help you visualize the magnitude of that volume of data, we've compiled this handy dandy chart:

12 terabytes of data are roughly equivalent to:

- 5,280,000,000 single-spaced typewritten pages
- 1, 006,633 phone books
- 19,358 regular compact discs
- 2,614.5 DVDs
- 61.4 average-sized hard disks (200 GB)
- 9.6 human brains (the capacity of a human being's functional memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes by futurist Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near)
- all the data from Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

I don't know the details of the legal order, but it seems that if information is information, then Google should just hand over the data in 5 billion sheets of single-spaced typewritten page. Comic sans font. IN CAPS!!1!

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Comments (68)

Google would gain back a lot of respect if they did just that. Also, Viacom has said that they are open to getting the information that wouldn't require the exposure of usernames/emails but take that with a grain of salt. Don't be surprised if you suddenly get a lot of spam from Viacom-owned companies based on your user preferences!
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When they hand it to them in 5,280,000,000 single-spaced typewritten pages it should be encrypted with code from a captain crunch cereal box super secret decoder, "here ya go smarties, you figure it out"
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I'm thinking that they should at least use 1.5 spacing. . . maybe even double spaced 12.5px font. That would at least make it 7 billion pages. . . I would love to see Viacom use that in their lawsuit. You honor, I would like to submit 12 billion pages as exhibit A.
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This is realy a good comparison of how much information you can store in different media devices. With information growing year by year, we need better ways to store all the data.
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12 terrabytes is not very much, i mean, that's like 12x 1TB hard drives. I manage that amount of data at my day job, and have a quarter of that much data at home.

i thought we'd be looking more at 12x petabytes of data for You Tube.
In which case viacom will need to re-consider it's request more realistically.
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Google could turn over the data in 5 billion pages, then pay off the $1 billion damage claim in 100 billion loose, unwrapped pennies...which would be how many dump truck loads?.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds
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It should read "What *does" twelve terabytes of data look like?" not "What *do* twelve terabytes of data look like?" Grammar counts, especially for headlines.
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Now this is only a rough estimate, but about 39111 trees would be used for 5 billion pages.
1 4x4x8 foot stack of wood will give you about 90000 sheets of paper.
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Those were all neat except for the "human brain capacity". Thats one hell of an estimate... I mean, I'm not sure how you can really estimate that. This still gives an excellent representation and comparison of that massive amount of data.
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i still think viacom needs to be slapped with a class action lawsuit. they're supposed to notify every single user whose data they're looking at, according to the original law the judge tweaked to allow youtube to fall under rules for places like blockbuster.
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Back in my admin days when I used to purchase 9Gb drives for $2500, 12terrabytes would be a formidable thought (1,300 of the 9giggers at $3million).

But these days when you can go out to any computermart and buy a dozen terrabyte drives for less than $3k and put them all on one tabletop connected to one PC, it's really not that bad.

Scary to think that having that much space is so affordable and downright practical for a single user....
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Power to the People. Damn Viacom!
Here's the Top 10 List - The People's Response TO Viacoms Lawsuit Against YouTube Inc.

http://www.techxiety.com/techxiety/2008/07/techxietys-top-ten-list---the-peoples-response-to-viacoms-lawsuit-against-youtube-inc.html
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Re grammar: "of data" is not at issue. The determining phrase is "12 terabytes-worth."

If the terabytes were considered plural rather than a mass of information, the plural construction would be fine. But it's actually "terabytes-worth," which is a singular concept. It's the worth that is the problem. If you dropped it, you could argue either way, I think.
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How long would it be in voice recording? "Row two hundred and thirty eight thousand nine hundred forty two, video id tag nine Y X Z four D U Z 2 C K viewed by userid two thousand foorteen...."
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'Data' is plural. It should read “What *do* twelve terabytes of data look like?” not “What *does* twelve terabytes of data look like?” Grammar counts, especially for grammar nazis.
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I second the paper thing, only "accidentally" have a breeze blow it around and leave them unnumbered. Hell, better yet, put it as a torrent in .daa format and only see to 98.9%. I'd gladly help seed a 1 terabyte chunk... at least some of it.
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"WTF? All Youtube videos and data ONLY 12 TB ? that’s very little in my opinion."

Wouldn't it just be just "Video Id", "User Id", "User IP". Not the actual video data.
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what kind of an asshole titles his article "what do 12 terabytes-worth of data look like?" and then makes a graph that has no relevance or scale?

oh, you did.
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I support Zecc. What a waste of trees that would be. Mat, I know trees are renewable, but it takes 20 years to have a decent size tree...and besides : common, cutting tree just for a stupid lawsuit...

They are talking about digital data, give them some hard drives rather than trees...And we all know that this much paper will either get mixed up, lost, or thrown away over the years. So what's the point. Hashes can proove no alterations were made to the data, so I stick to 12x1TB hard drives.

BTW, business comment was pretty funny :)
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I would have guessed it to be a lot more than 12TB. At least a hundred.

I guess it keeps the file size down when you make them all over-compressed and crappy looking. Keeps the bandwidth costs down too.
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I know it's a lot of information, but when I first looked at 12 terabytes, it just didn't sound like much, until I saw the illustration of 1 million phone books, then it sunk in a little.

Sorry, brain fart.
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woww I feel..people here are spending so much of time in calculating and analysing the media and papers and trees...even google/youtube would not take that much of time in accumulating and sending (or may be printing or faxing or watever) the data to viacom!!!
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what´s the purpose of analyzing who, where and what ? only thing that comes to my mind is commercial purposes. i sure hope that the .log is made public.. it´s good to know what your neighbour´s r up to :] after ten years of investigating u´ll know she/he likes AC/DC too.
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um... why does everyone assume that 9.6 brains is accurate? How did they even find that out? It's not like you can click "save" and brain will say "sorry memory full." Am I missing something?
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The trouble with more data is that more data isn't a problem, so long as you have the capacity to absorb it ... the `trouble` with more data is that data is searchable, can be sorted and its relatively easy to find what you're looking for *if* you know what you're looking for and such data exists in your searchable database ...
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How can people tell if 12 tb is 9.6 brains?? I dont think thats very accurate, because as we research more and more about the brain we realise that your memeory capacity keeps on getting bigger, first they thought it was 1tb, then 10tb now people say depending on how much information each brain cell holds, around
100 million megabytes (100tb) Now theyre saying 100-tb to unlimited capacity... The brain is complicated.
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Not to mention it depends on how you /use/ the brain for storage. I mean, why not go the whole way and use genetic storage? Estimates show that you can fit the entire library of congress onto a sperm :P
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