Humankind will generate over one sextillion bytes of digital information this year, surging into a zettabyte. In 2010, 1.2 zettabytes of digital information will be created, according to a new Digital Universe study from IDC, sponsored by IT firm EMC Corporation.
A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (that's 21 zeroes for those counting). Think of a zettabyte like watching an hour long tv show continuously for 125 years.