This actually seems very low to me. The archive at DigitalGlobe is over 80PB of data [1], and was growing at over 2PB a year [2] before the latest satellite wen

This actually seems very low to me. The archive at DigitalGlobe is over 80PB of data [1], and was growing at over 2PB a year [2] before the latest satellite went up. There are more bands in the imagery than RGB, so it is larger because of that. But somewhere Google is storing the original resolution data. Aerial imagery is at an even higher resolution, so even larger per square kilometer. They also are holding different resolution data for different zoom levels. They do not resample aerial imagery past certain zoom levels, they use a different source. At approximately 3225x3225 pixels per square kilometer (31cm pixels in Worldview 3), that is approximately a 10 megapixel tiff, per square kilometer. Which I believe is roughly 35MB. 496Million square kilometers of land on earth not including antartica. Brings this over 17PB of raw data. And that is not including any historical data either. Before starting caching the different zoom levels of png's that are served out. I know not all of the world is covered at that high a resolution, but there are spots with even higher resolution to make up for it. Plus historical data. And plenty of water included in the images not counted either. I highly doubt they are holding anything less than 30PB. [1] https://www.digitalglobe.com/platforms/gbdx https://www.digitalglobe.com/platforms/gbdx [2] http://www.networkcomputing.com/big-data/how-digitalglobe-handles-2-petabytes-satellite-data-yearly/767935503 http://www.networkcomputing.com/big-data/how-digitalglobe-ha...