Internet Archive Now Stores Over 10,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes of the Web

For both simple and in-depth information, Wikipedia has become a go-to spot for many. While fact-checking is recommended for important information you may come across, the fact that the online service stores millions of articles tackling almost every possible subject makes it an amazing resource. But what about the abundance of information that's not stored there, such as audio, video, and even entire websites? For that, there's Internet Archive.

Internet Archive is about as old as the Internet itself, having launched in 1996. Its goal is to archive as much of the Web as possible, including websites you visit every single day, such as HotHardware. If websites were all the Internet Archive sought out, its storage requirements may not be so extreme, but in addition, the service also backs up millions of audio files and about half a million video files.

Given those numbers, it's of little surprise that the Internet Archive this past weekend announced a new milestone: 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes stored. Interestingly, the official FAQ page states that it only has a fraction of this current total archived, so it's obviously quite out of date. On the same page it's mentioned that 20TB is archived each day, but today's number is likely much higher.

Just how much data is 10 quadrillion bytes? It's equal to 8.88 petabytes, 9,094 terabytes, 9,313,225 gigabytes and about 317 million installs of Duke Nukem 3D. Suddenly, my 10TB NAS seems so unimpressive.

In addition to this announcement, the Internet Archive also opened up academic requests for access to a special 80TB crawl containing data from over 2.2 billion URLs, and also promotes the opening of its Balinese digital library collection.

At its heart, Archive.org offers a lot more than website captures, so we're curious - if you visit Archive.org on a regular basis, what part of the service do you take advantage of most?