Facebook’s Photo Storage
Small Team, Big Impact: The People Behind Photos (video above) from Facebook’s “Life at Facebook” page
Whoa! According to the above video Facebook is currently (as of three months ago) storing roughly 19,000 Terabytes of photos.
The video states that they’re growing at a rate of 1 billion new photos a month (2,000 every second). Based on a VERY rough guesstimate of 500K a picture (half a megabyte) which doesn’t include the various “versions” of a file that they store including thumbnail, “medium” and the full size, that works out to an additional 476 Terabytes in a month. To give you a sense of size, that’s approximately the space required to store 142,606,336 songs… which is increasing each month.
It must be mindblowing to see the infrastructure that has to be in place to not only handle that number of photos but to also accommodate the explosive growth! Anyone at Facebook want to give me a tour? 