geopbyte

English

Etymology

The term was in use on English-language websites by 2009 (see quotation below). Before that, it had begun to appear on Spanish-language sites by 2007. The earliest known use is in a February 2006 edit to Spanish Wikipedia's "Byte" article by an anonymous contributor, whose immediately preceding edits to another article make it clear that the term was inspired by Korean 겁 (劫, geop), presumably in the sense "kalpa" (an extremely long span of time in Hindu and Buddhist chronology).

Noun

geopbyte (plural geopbytes)

1. (computing, nonstandard) Roughly 10³⁰ bytes; 1024 brontobytes.

   Synonym: quettabyte

   • 2009 June 27, NightFire [comment author], “WinXP Overhaul Guide: How to Make It Look Like Vista, Run Like Lightning, and Stay Productive, Fast & Smooth”, in Instructables‎^[2], comment:

     I don't remember where I found this: […] 1000 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte […] Geopbyte: Not sure why this term was created. It's doubtful that anyone alive today will ever see a Geopbyte hard drive.

   • 2014, John G. Iannarelli, Michael O'Shaughnessy, Information Governance and Security Protecting and Managing Your Company's Proprietary Information, page 35:

     Geopbyte: a geopbyte is 1,024 brontobytes, which is too much data to even comprehend.

   • 2015, Jenny Dearborn, Data Driven, page 41:

     Any substantial company that doesn't take advantage of its own geopbytes of available data is in danger of eventual extinction.

   • 2015, Patricia Sengstack, Charles Boicey, Mastering Informatics: A Healthcare Handbook for Success, page 18:

     Chapter 16, “Healthcare Analytics”: Covering data analytics/big data/population management; effectively managing the geopbytes of data out there lurking in our electronic records […]

   • 2015, Marcel Kunze, “Big Data Technologies”, in Lucio Grandinetti, G. R Joubert, M. Kunze, editor, Big Data and High Performance Computing, page 71:

     While scientists still struggle with some petabytes of data, the digital economy is lifting the bar to the zetta and yotta scale. Some stakeholders in the field are already starting to talk about the even larger dimensions of brontobytes and geopbytes.

   • 2022, Pooja Anand, Yashwant Singh, Harvinder Singh, Mohammad Dahman Alshehri, Sudeep Tanwar, “SALT: transfer learning‑based threat model for attack detection in smart home”, in Scientific Reports, →DOI:

     Such a massive increase in the usage of smart devices will end up generating the data up to Geopbytes (1030)^[sic] even.

   • 2023, How Big is a Geopbyte?‎^[3], YouTube:

     You cannot wrap your head around how big a geopbyte is.

Usage notes

Geop- is not a standard prefix in the metric International System of Units.