Floating its way up from seven per cent in 2011.
Cloud-based storage is on the rise, with companies like Apple and Amazon, pushing their respective iCloud and Cloud Player platforms, providing users access to their content across various connected devices.
Researcher Gartner says just seven per cent of consumer content was stored via the tech last year, and expects it to grow to 36 per cent by 2016.
An exabyte is equivalent to one billion gigabytes, and last year worldwide digital storage sat at 329 exabytes across PCs, smartphones, tablets, hard-disk drives, network storage and the cloud.
Gartner reckons this will need to grow to 4.1 zettabytes – 4,100 exabytes – in the next five years, as the number of users taking photos and videos via their device increases.
Meanwhile, social networks such as Facebook will serve as large free cloud-based storage providers for consumers, with usage outshining that of online storage providers, which are also by prosumers.
Shalini Verma, principal research analyst, Gartner, said: "Historically, consumers have generally stored content on their PCs, but as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras.
"This is leading to a massive increase in new user-generated content that requires storage. With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices."
Additionally, average storage per household will rise from 464GB in 2011, to 3.3 terabytes (3,300 GB) in 2016.
Average storage per household will grow from 464 gigabytes in 2011 to 3.3 terabytes in 2016.
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