Facebook Stores 240 Billion Photos And Adds 350 Million More A Day

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Some 618 million people use Facebook every day, the company told investors today.

And that adds up to mind-boggling amount of data, especially photos.

Facebook stores more than 240 billion photos, with some 350 million new photos uploaded a day, reports Data Center Knowledge's Rich Miller.

To house those photos and all the other stuff, the company has built some of the most sophisticated data centers in the world, particularly its showpiece data center in Prineville, Ore.

But the company also owns and leases space in lots of other sites.

Facebook will spend $1.8 billion in 2013 on capital expenditures, mostly on servers, data centers, and infrastructure, it said today.

That's only a modest increase from 2012, when it spent $1.6 billion.

For the money, Facebook has to solve some big data center problems. For instance, only 8 percent of those 240 billion photos account for over 82 percent of Facebook's traffic, Miller reports. That means that Facebook can't just use the cheapest, but slowest, technology to store all of its photos. It can only use the cheapest, slowest systems for photos no one is looking at. So it developed its own software to figure out how popular each photo will be and put it in the right spot in every data center.

Here's a look at how Facebook divides up its capital-expenditure, or capex, dollars between its fancy state-of-the-art data centers and leased properties.

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