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How 1GB of data has changed over the years

A man holds a white box in his hands. It's full to the brim with brightly coloured floppy discs - 726 to be exact. In front of the box in his other hand is a small USB drive. Both the box and the USB drive have exactly the same amount of memory.How much space would you need in your home to store 10,000 documents? Forty years ago, the answer was enough room for a filing cabinet. Today a gigabyte of data takes up a lot less space. 

1GB data =

  • 1970s: A four-drawer filing cabinet
  • 1980s: 736 floppy disks
  • 1990s: 1½ CD-Rs
  • 2000s: 1 USB flash drive
  • 2010s: Cloud storage

Bulky filing cabinets have been replaced as new technologies have transformed how data is stored and used. But, as data has become more portable and the amount of space needed to store files has reduced, so has how easy it is to lose.

Data from the Information Commissioner Office reveals more organisations than ever are experiencing cyber security breaches that put people’s personal information at risk. Over 3,000 cyber breaches were reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2023, with the finance, retail and education sectors reporting the most incidents.