Our dna sequencer routinely takes multiple 1/2 gig tiffs pictures of illuminated base-pairs every hour 
For how long has this been taking pictures? Could imagine you got Petabyte servers?
The sequencing is finished in 2 - 3 days. The images are analyzed on the fly and the illuminated spots are converted into text files like "GATTACA" and images are then deleted.
e.g. http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenpath/hg19/chromosomes/