Data, Data and Storing it in The Cloud

Our ever expanding personal libraries of documents, photos, videos and music has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of data we store. In Part One, we looked at the history of computer storage. Today, more and more individuals and businesses are choosing to store this content somewhere other than their personal computer, hard drive or phone.  

Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive; the names are familiar and they essentially all do the same thing - store files remotely for you. Add in social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for photo and video storage and you the have potential for a significant amount of your data being stored in "The Cloud" 

No, your files are not orbiting somewhere in the stratosphere, but stored on enormous facilities full of hard drives spread around the world in what is a global scale computer network connected by the internet. In essence, you files are sent along a pipe, and filed on someone else's hard drive, then backed up on other hard drives in different locations around the world. If you have an active internet connection you now have free (or very cheap) data back up solutions available to you. 

 But hang on, is my data safe if I store it in the Cloud? 

The simple answer is yes. Sort of. Everything is hackable and nothing is breach proof, however if you follow standard precautionary rules like choosing credible providers and using strong passwords you are much less likely to lose data than by using home grown methods. After all, rates of personal data back up is very low. We've all been there - laptop gets left on the bus, flash drive gets put through the wash, or phone falls down the toilet and you don't have a backed up copy of that important presentation or precious photo. Syncing your data with a cloud solution can avoid these potentially painful experiences, not to mention making your files more accessible when you are away from your computer.

The investment in storage and security by big players such as Facebook and Google in security and infrastructure is vast. As an example Google has a dozen data centres around the world, containing an estimated 900,000 servers using 260 million watts of power. Facebook's most recent facility pictured below (note the trucks for scale) is built on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in an attempt to keep energy usage lower. Amazon is currently building a similar facility in remote Northwest China for the same reason. All those targeted advertisements on web pages and in your Facebook feed are there in part to pay for this infrastructure.

It is estimated that 2016 will be the year that a mind-blowing one Zettabyte of data will be stored online, that's enough for a 22 billion year long music playlist and remembering Moores Law this amount will only continue to rise.

So whats next? In part three we look at streaming services and productivity in the cloud and answer the question, how much data fits into the human brain.