How Much Porn Does It Take to Fill Up “Unlimited” Cloud Storage?

August 28, 2017
JACK-BLACKBUSH

A Lot. A Lot of Porn.

Apple, Amazon, and other sites like to offer "unlimited" cloud storage, but in actuality, it's not really unlimited, it's just a lot of storage. The idea is to offer a large amount of storage that you'll never fill up. Well, one beaston02 (as he's known on Reddit) managed to completely fill up his Amazon unlimited storage with a ton of porn.

Here's the thing: beaston02 did this all on purpose. He really wanted to find out what the true limit was in Amazon's so-called unlimited plan so, he started recording webcam footage from sites like CamSoda, Chaturbate, and MyFreeCams. After six months he had saved 1.8 petabyes (one petabyte equals one million gigabytes) and his account was full. Let's break it down:

1.8 petabytes is about 23.4 years of HD-TV video, but webcam streams are nowhere near that quality. A few good folks crunched the numbers: 720p is about two gigabytes per hour, and at 900,000 hours, that's 102 years of straight calendar time. If the videos are even lower quality, say, 480p, that's around 0.7 gigabytes per hour, or 293 years and six months. Better get to watching.

Now, beaston02 wasn't so much doing it for the porn, though he does enjoy porn like the rest of us; it was more about exploring computer related things, or as he put it:

"Ever since I got into computers, I found myself learning more, and faster when it was something more interesting. Call me crazy, but women interest me more than most other things on the internet and there is a huge amount of data being created daily, so it was a good fit for the project."

"I know plenty of people have labeled me some huge pervert or someone with a huge porn addiction, but that's really not me at all, I have more of a problem with collecting or hoarding data than I do with porn."

Addicted to porn or addicted to computers, either way, it's kind of amazing to think one person put this much effort into figuring something like this out. And also, they figured it out with porn.