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Estimationstretch
Estimate the storage needed for one day of YouTube uploads.
How to approach it
Break it into hours of video uploaded per day times storage per hour, then account for multiple quality versions and backups.
How a strong answer opens
“I'll break this into hours of video uploaded per day times storage per hour, then account for the multiple quality versions and backup copies a video service keeps.”
Outline of a strong answer
Try answering out loud for a few minutes before you open this.
- Clarify: raw uploads plus processed versions, one day
- Assume hours of video uploaded per minute, as a round number
- Convert to hours per day
- Estimate storage per hour at a typical quality
- Multiply for multiple resolutions and backup copies
- Express the result in petabytes and sanity-check the gigabytes per hour against an HD video file you have downloaded
Where this question usually goes wrong
Counting only the raw upload and forgetting the several resolutions and backup copies each video is stored as.
Learn the method
Worked cases 1 to 4 in Module 3, Estimation.
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