Purdue University professor Vladimir Shalaev explained during a speech at the International Conference for Quantum Technologies in Moscow that as our society quickly evolves more and more into an information-based one, people are beginning to need an increased amount of hard drive space to store their “digital lives.”

In other words, we’re storing more stuff on our computers at an alarmingly growing rate.

To compare, according to Professor Shalaev, the average person only stored around 500 megabytes in 1986, but by 2007 (six years ago!) that rate had exploded to 44.5 gigabytes — a growth rate of 8,800%. And these days, even 44.5 GB isn’t considered a lot of space.

However, most people aren’t actually housing all of that data themselves, and instead use cloud-based services (such as Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) to do it for them, which adds a burden to those companies tasked with keeping track of data for millions-to-billions of users.

So. How much “junk” do you have? Let us know in the comments below!

[via Business Insider]