The total amount of information stored in USB flash drives, CDs, books, hard drives and all that, across the world totals up to 295 exabytes, a study published in the journal Science claims.

The calculated amount of data is equivalent to as many as 1.2 billion average hard drives’ combined capacity. The calculation was made by estimating the amount of data stored in sixty technologies, ranging from PCs to paper ads, during the time-period of 1986 to 2007.

Speaking on the topic, Dr. Martin Hilbert from the University of Southern California said, "If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in 3 layers of books.”

It is the digital revolution that accounts for much of the increase in the information in the world. In 2007, around 94 per cent of the information in the world was stored digitally. The global digital storage capacity surpassed total analog capacity for the first time in 2002.

A computer’s storage capacity has conventionally been measured in kilobytes, then megabytes. Nowadays, computer storage is measured in gigabytes, which is followed by greater store capacities terabytes, petabytes and exabytes. One exabyte is equivalent to one billion gigabytes.