It’s obvious that people have gotten bigger these past few decades, what’s less obvious is how data has grown bigger in the past few years. In fact, 90% of the digital data we have today, was created in the last 2 years. Put another way, in 2010 we had just 10% of the digital data we have today.

In 2011, an estimated 1.2 TRILLION Gigabytes of data was created. That’s roughly 200GB for every man women and child in the world–In just one year. That’s every person in the world watching almost 300 feature length films every day, and this is the average.

The reason is simple, we now keep digital records of our transactions (e-banking and credit cards), our running patterns, our spending habits and even our wedding photos–and that’s just commercial end user applications.

What about corporations who track thousands of data points per second for their manufacturing plants and supermarkets tracking the purchases of customers. We’re creating and gobbling far more data than before, and the trend doesn’t look to be stopping. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.