I’m curious about a theoretical tech question:
If someone wanted to download and store the entire internet (websites, videos, images, databases, archives, etc.), how much storage space would actually be needed today?
Would it be measured in petabytes, exabytes, or even more? Also, how much of the internet is publicly accessible vs hidden/private data?
I’d love to hear realistic estimates, technical explanations, or interesting comparisons from people who know about large-scale data storage and internet infrastructure.
Downloading the “entire internet” is practically impossible because the internet is constantly growing and changing every second. However, estimates suggest that publicly accessible web data alone could require hundreds of petabytes to several exabytes of storage.
To understand the scale:
1 petabyte (PB) = 1 million GB
1 exabyte (EB) = 1 billion GB
This estimate does not even include private servers, cloud databases, streaming content, dark web data, or real-time updates. Storing everything would require massive data centers similar to those used by major tech companies like Google or Amazon.