Will Megaupload's 28 petabytes of data be deleted?

22.03.2012
The hosting provider for the defunct file-sharing site Megaupload wants to delete the data now that investigators have collected most of what they need for the criminal case against the company's operators.

Carpathia Hosting said maintaining Megaupload's servers costs US$9,000 a day, a cost it should not bear since its not a party to the case, according to a document filed on Tuesday in a U.S. federal court and .

Megaupload leased 1,103 servers located in both the U.S. and Canada from Carpathia. Those servers hold at least 25 and as much as 28 petabytes of data by Carpathia's estimates, an astounding amount of data.

One petabyte of data is equivalent to 13.3 years of high-definition video, or all of the content in the U.S. Library of Congress -- by its own claim the largest library in the world -- multiplied by 50, according to a footnote in the court filing.

Federal prosecutors have charged seven people and two companies with copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with Megaupload, which they maintain encouraged sharing of content without the permission of the copyright owners.

Megaupload's flamboyant founder, Kim Dotcom, is free on bail living near Auckland, but the U.S. wants to extradite him. Extradition proceedings are expected to begin in August.