What's cool is that with advances in AI and indexing, I think the answer will be knowable, from a certain date moving forward only. So you might see an article like "How much data was uploaded publicly in 2037."Trick question!
The real question on my mind: how much storage space to cover the entire history of the internet’s contents, including revisions to sites; fly-by-night storage locker links like Mega; DMCA-takedown(ed) content; and everything file-shared with a publicly accessible link?
It’s unanswerable, which is a shame. It didn’t have to be this way.
What will be tricky is knowing how much data is stored privately in things like iCloud and Dropbox, or even submitted as a form stored in a database, as an example. It might be possible to know the total amount uploaded across all ISPs and use AI to run analytics on that. I bet each company knows the answer to that question for their customers because they likely use that data to plan projections for future upgrades. They may share this information with their technology partners that are developing solutions for them. Would be really fascinating to find out.