Average storage per household to grow 7x by 2016 - How much will be in the cloud by 2016?

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Gartner believes it’s 36%

According to a Gartner Press Release, they said “just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016.” The release goes on to say that a bulk of the storage will be on social media sites like Facebook where we are free to upload photos and videos at will – at no cost. Adoption of other cloud storage, syncing, and backup will increase as consumers get more comfortable with such services.

I don’t know about you, but I never place photos or videos exclusively on Facebook, or any social media site. I have the original stored in my home on my desktop or network storage. Ironic that Seagate Backup Plus was just announced and it actually is the opposite. It can backup photos stored on Facebook and Flickr to local storage in your home. (My friends who upload Facebook photos straight from their phones say it’s a great feature.)

What’s more, Gartner predicts the “average storage per household will grow from 464 gigabytes in 2011 to 3.3 terabytes in 2016.” That means by 2016, households will have 1.188 terabytes in the cloud if we assume the same 36% of household storage will be cloud based. Gartner acknowledges that local storage will remain the main method for consumers to store their digital content, but they do predict that its share will progressively drop from 93 percent in 2011 to 64 percent in 2016 as this direct-to-cloud model becomes more mainstream.

I’m a big fan of Gartner. They know what they are talking about…I’m just having a hard time applying the 36% to my own habits and preferences. But maybe that is exactly what they are predicting…our storage habits will change, and they will change sooner than we think.

I’m guessing no more than 5% of my total storage is in the cloud today (not counting my own personal cloud in the form of a NAS)…36% in 4 short years…we’ll see.

What are you storing today locally vs. in the cloud?

What would/could you do with 5GB of free storage?

Who is the largest cloud customer? You.