Think more like probably ten years. Thirty at the most.
Twenty years ago, Hard Drives were typically 500MB to 1 GB. Now, they're 2-4 TB. So, 2000% bigger. Given Moore's Law, we should have A PB (Petabyte) in 10 years, and a exabyte in 20. A Zetabyte in 30. Mind you, 1,024 exabytes is one petabyte. . The Cloud is measured in units of Zetabytes.
Here's some numbers on the Cloud...
Facebook, in its IPO filing, said it stores over 100 petabytes (PB) of media (photos and videos). It’s not unrealistic to say that Facebook probably has a total storage of capacity well beyond that, once you factor in backups and other data (status updates, likes, and so on), possibly in the 300PB range.
Microsoft recently admitted that Hotmail stores over 100 petabytes, and that SkyDrive, with “17 million customers,” stores 10PB of data. Like Facebook, Microsoft’s total capacity, once we factor in the rest of Azure and its web properties, is probably well over 300 petabytes.
Megaupload is relatively tiny in comparison, apparently storing just 25 petabytes.
Amazon, rather than giving us a nice, easy number of petabytes, instead announces the total number of objects stored by its S3 cloud storage service. As of April 2012, Amazon S3 stored 905 billion objects. If we assume an average size of 100KB, that’s around 90 petabytes; if the average size is 1MB, that’s 900 petabytes — almost an exabyte!
Dropbox, a year ago, stored “10+ petabytes” of data. It had 25 million users then, and 100 million users today, so all things being equal the company now stores around 40PB of data.
Imagine having an AI that has access to all that potential data. Meanwhile, we're telling all these tech companies its okay to use our data.