The digital data explosion.

According to a new IDC study, the world generated 161 billion gigabytes--161 exabytes--of digital data last year. While storage space is plentiful and continues to get cheaper, that's still a whole lot of data to manage and store.

It's so much data, IDC said, that it represents three times the information in all the books ever written, or 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. The report took into account photos, videos, e-mail, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls, and other digital content used today. Researchers assumed that an average digital file is copied three times.

In 2003, University of California-Berkeley researchers found that the world produced five exabytes annually. They examined original data only, not all the times data were replicated, and counted digital, as well as non-electronic data, and estimated how much space that would take up if digitized. By contrast, if IDC had considered only original data, the result would have been 40 exabytes, according to the Associated Press.

Perhaps most important, IDC found that digital data is outpacing its storage space. The research firm estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of data generated is expected to jump from 161 exaytes in 2006 to 988 exabytes in 2010, according to IDC.