55 Trillion File & Object Transfers in 2025

One of the things I mused over during the new year break was “How many files did Australians transfer during 2025?” 

I asked an AI to assist me in a sweep of available data sources and come up with a reasoned estimation. 

Humans + Hidden 

When most people think about digital activity, they picture emails, cloud uploads, or the occasional shared document. Yet when we model Australia’s full digital ecosystem across 2025, a very different picture emerges.  

Human‑initiated file sharing — email attachments, messaging app files, cloud uploads — accounts for only a tiny fraction of the nation’s digital movement. Analysis places that figure at around 82 billion files per year, a substantial number on its own. But layering in the automated and infrastructural systems that underpin modern digital life, the scale expands dramatically. 

To reach an estimate of the total, four additional categories need to be accounted for. 

Automated system backups are the first major contributor. By estimating the number of organisations using cloud‑based incremental backup and applying conservative daily change rates, we arrived at roughly 11 trillion backup‑related file movements annually.  

Next came cloud sync events, driven by photo libraries, document updates, and multi‑device workflows. With around 60% of Australians using at least one active sync service, this added another 115 billion events. 

The real explosion came from Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Every webpage, app screen, and embedded image is delivered as a collection of discrete objects. By modelling daily request volumes and average objects per request, we estimated 34.4 trillion CDN object transfers in 2025.  

Finally, we incorporated machine‑to‑machine (M2M) activity—the internal chatter of microservices, logs, IoT payloads, and replication events—using a conservative multiplier. This added another 11.4 trillion movements. 

Together, these layers produced a staggering total: approximately 50–60 trillion digital file and object transfers across Australia in 2025. Humans are barely the spark; the infrastructure is the inferno. 

Implications for Organisations 

The scale of data movement across Australia has profound implications for organisations. When file movement becomes this vast, distributed, and automated, traditional ad‑hoc transfer methods simply can’t keep up. Security gaps widen, auditability collapses, and operational risk multiplies. 

That’s why Managed File Transfer (MFT) technology should no longer be considered “nice to have”. MFT provides a controlled, encrypted, policy‑driven framework for moving data across systems, partners, and cloud environments. It brings visibility to the invisible, governance to the chaotic, and reliability to the mission‑critical. In a world where trillions of transfers happen without a human ever touching a keyboard, MFT is the anchor that keeps organisations secure, compliant, and in control. 

Here to Help 

At Generic Systems Australia, we’re Australia’s and New Zealand’s experts in helping businesses implement and take leverage MFT solutions. We’ve assisted dozens of organisations to make their file transfers resilient, secure and reliable — boosting their efficiency in the process. 

If you’d like to discuss what MFT can do for your organisation, please feel welcome to get in touch with me. I’m always happy to have an obligation-free chat and explain how easily we can transition you from your current approach to the world’s leading MFT solution, GoAnywhere.