Digital information

A petabyte archive

A petabyte archive is a digital storage system designed to retain very large collections of data for long-term access.

How big is it?

1 PB of data

Data · example

Scale illustration of A petabyte archive, calibrated to its data measurement.
The marked data represents 1 PB.

A little perspective

About 11 times the compressed warc data of Common Crawl June 2025 WARC snapshot.

Common Crawl June 2025 WARC snapshot: The Common Crawl monthly web snapshot is a large, publicly available collection of web pages and related data gathered by automated crawlers each month.

Linear measure
BYTES OF DATA1 PB91 TB
02
Common Crawl June 2025 WARC snapshot91 TBCompressed WARC data
Bar length represents bytes. The physical sizes of devices are schematic; encoding and compression affect file sizes.
Measurements, assumptions & sources +

A petabyte archive

A defined 1 PB archive before replication or redundancy overhead.

Defined examples — our methodology

The marked data is calibrated. Unmeasured illustration details are representative.

Common Crawl June 2025 WARC snapshot

The June 2025 Common Crawl release reports 82.73 TiB of compressed WARC captures, about 91 trillion bytes. WAT, WET, indexes and uncompressed content are separate.

Common Crawl — June 2025 crawl archive

The marked compressed warc data is calibrated. Unmeasured illustration details are representative.

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Why this measurement?

Why we use 1 PB

For comparison, this page uses data. This is labelled example: an explicit comparison model rather than a claim that every example has the same value.

A defined 1 PB archive before replication or redundancy overhead.

The identifying illustration and the numerical comparison remain separate. How calibrated comparisons work →

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Recorded properties

A petabyte archive dimensions and measurements

PropertySelected valueRecorded rangeBasis
1 PBNot recordedexample

Around this scale

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Sources and method

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