Updated 2022/07/30
“Cloud Services” offered by Google, Microsoft, Apple and others allow us to store data in the “Cloud“. Most us have “smart phones” these days and our “lives” are held on these devices. Contacts, appointments, photos and other stuff are stored on our phones and if our phone gets lost or goes on the blink, we panic! However, in most cases the contents of your (smart) phone are squirted up to “the Cloud“, which means you can usually get a new phone and then do a “Restore from Backup” to get your new phone back up and running fairly quickly but note some apps might need re-installing and you will probably have to re-enter passwords. Your data is usually kept very securely and is usually backed up (copied) to a different (or multiple) location(s) so you can be reasonably sure that your data won’t be lost. In fact in most cases deleting stuff you don’t want isn’t deleted, it just appears to have been deleted! That’s another topic.
So what is “the Cloud” ?
For many years network engineers and techies have drawn network diagrams of the company LAN, to show things like location of “sub nets” and VLANs etc. The diagrams show IP address ranges and data paths within the company network (LAN). In many cases companies have more than one geographic location and each location would have a different IP address range. To connect the different locations, the Internet Infrastructure has to be used and each location would have an “Internet Gateway” router. The “Gateway” router would have (and still is) depicted as picture of a cloud, to indicate that the data paths between the different company locations (networks) was basically unknown and not under the control of the network techies.
The sales and marketing people have latched on to “The Cloud” and use it to sell a “new” service / product.
The “Cloud” is basically another word for (the) “Internet” and “Internet” is a “portmanteau” of “Inter Connected Networks“. Back in the 1950s / 1960s Inter Connected “Computers” was used instead of “Networks“, mainly because “Networking” wasn’t really “a thing” until about 1969. “Inter Connected Computers” was first “theorised” by Liklider and he is considered to be the father of the Internet although the the word “Internet” wasn’t “coined” until about 1969. “ARPANET” built on the ideas of Liklider, Bob Taylor and others.
Here’s a good read about the Computer Network History, it can be seen that the 1960’s, 70’s 80s were a collection of (brilliant) minds sharing ideas but some individuals were picked out for their success in certain areas.
Some suggest “Internet” means “International Network”, which doesn’t make much sense when referring to a “Global Inter connected Network“. When we talk about the “Internet“, we are basically referring to an Infrastructure (of Cables and routers etc) which is outside of our “Local Premises”.
Each Country / Nation has its own “Internet infrastructure” that usually uses the Telephone Infrastructure (of cables etc) and generally all Countries (World wide) are connected (often via Submarine Cables) to make a “Global Internet infrastructure” commonly known as the “Internet“! To access this (global) Infrastructure, we use an ISP (Internet Service Provider). In the UK, most ISPs provide a “Router” which is a device that allows you to access the Internet using the ISPs equipment and Cables.
For most people, the Internet is likely mainly used to access “Web Sites / Pages”, “invented” by (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) early 1990’s. The www (World Wide Web) allows “people” to set up “Web Servers” that would allow “the world” to access “Web Content” using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). The basic idea was that “Web Content” was available to anyone who visited a “Web Site” and generally that was an “open for all” type situation. HTTP has now been replaced by HTTPS, a more secure connection method.
In many (maybe most) households there is only one device e.g Desktop, Laptop, Tablet that needs to access the “Internet”. In some households there are several devices that need to access the “Internet”. All devices connect to the ISP provided router via Ethernet or WiFi (including phones that are using WiFi) and are set up (automatically) to be part of a LAN (Local Area Network). The ISP provided router is the “common Internet Gateway” or Just “Internet Gateway” that allows devices on your LAN to connect to the “Global Internet Infrastructure“. The LAN uses “private” IP addresses (usually provided by the router) and is usually protected by a firewall (within the router) to prevent traffic from the “public” Internet accessing your LAN.
“The Cloud” in more recent years has been used to refer to “Cloud Storage”, “Cloud Services” and “Cloud Computing”, all of which provides a means of storing your data somewhere within the “Global Internet Infrastructure” and in most cases your data is / can be stored in multiple geographic locations to give security, reliability and robustness.
The “Internet” generally refers to the Infrastructure of cables and routers etc and “Cloud” often refers to other kit e.g. servers that are available via the Internet Infrastructure. Generally speaking, the www offers “Web Content” that can be perused, in the same way that you can peruse books in a library. “Cloud Services” basically make their kit available to “registered users” and is not “open to all and sundry” in the same way that Web Pages are. e,g, Web Pages are “Reading Material”. Cloud Services usually offer a “two way” system that allows the “uploading” of data to servers (somewhere in the Global Internet) and these Servers are usually held in data centres which are not part of the Internet Infrastructure* but are accessed using the (Global) Internet Infrastructure.
*DNS servers can be considered as an integral part of the Internet Infrastructure as these deal with IP addresses. There are hundreds of DNS servers connected to the Internet Infrastructure and without them the Internet would not work. To confuse things a little, Google and others make their DNS servers available to the public buy hey ho 🙂
In the case of Mobile / Cell Phones that are not using a WiFi connection, they use the “Mobile Network” infrastructure to allow you to access the “Global Internet Infrastructure” using radio signals. Currently 3G, 4G and 5G connections are used for “data” and it is likely that your voice calls now also use the “data” channels instead of the old GPRS channels.
If you have an Android smart phone (or tablet), your photos will be squirted up to “photos.google.com. iPads and iPhones will squirt them up to the Apple iCloud. If you use Microsoft Onedrive, your photos and documents can be squirted up to the “Microsoft Cloud”. You can usually share content with others when you use these services.
For many / most people who just want to store photos, the free cloud storage services will probably be adequate but modern smart phones have cameras that take photos of several “Megapixels” that produce file sizes of huge amounts and IMO most people don’t need photos with file sizes this huge so I would recommend that you look at the camera setting to reduce the file size of the photos you take otherwise your Free storage will soon reach its limit.
You could use something like Irfanview to do a batch resize of your photos so that instead of them being several MB in size, they are reduced to a few KB, without loss of “clarity”.
Currently, Google offer 15GB of free storage which is spread across Email, Photos and Google Drive / Docs. If you are prudent and do some regular “house keeping” e.g. delete stuff you don’t need, the 15GB will likely be fine. Microsoft and Apple only offer a measly 5GB of free storage 🙁
If you are a “typical” user of Email, it’s likely that you don’t pay much attention to “mail box maintenance“. You might delete some messages but these deleted messages only get sent to “Trash” and these can build up over many years. In the case of Gmail, the best option is log in using a browser and then empty the “Deleted Items”. The “All Mail” folder might surprise you, it contains deleted items, sent items and inbox items so you need to spend some time sorting out what you want saving.
Whatever the amount of free (Cloud) storage you are given, at some point you are going to need to decide on what to keep and what to delete or you will have to decide to pay for additional storage space!
So far, we have only touched on Smartphones and photos but if you have a Desktop PC or Laptop or Tablet, things can start to get a little complicated. Typically most “home users” create documents like letters to Aunt Maud and these are usually stored on the “local HDD” (of the device being used) and that is fine as long as you have a “Backup Strategy” e.g. you backup your “Local HDD data” to an external source e.g. USB HDD or other. You could save your documents in “the Cloud” e.g. Onedrive, Google Drive (Google Docs) etc. but you need to keep an eye on the amount of free Storage space.
Storing your data in the cloud can be a good option because when the “Local HDD” fails, you lose everything on the “Local HDD”. When you install a new HDD, you will need to re-install the OS (Operating System) and applications before you can even start to think about restoring your data. The solution to this is to make regular “Disk Image backups” as these create a “snapshot” of your “Local HDD”, this means that when you install a new HDD; you can use a previously created “Image” to “re-Image” the new HDD to get it back to a state when the image was created. See “Backups revisited“.
In the main, Cloud storage and Cloud Services offer a robust and reliable service but to use them you need a reliable Internet connection. If you want to work on documents stored “in the Cloud” and your Internet connection goes down, you won’t be able to access those documents. This is not a big problem if you have a mobile device with a 4 or 5G connection as you can set this up to be a “WiFi Hotspot” so that your non mobile devices can use WiFi to access the Internet. This is usually called “Tethering”.
For a lot of people, using the “Cloud” to store photos and documents that you want to share with others is a good option but if you prefer to store your Photos and Documents “Locally” e.g. on your “local HDD” and not “somewhere on the Internet” and you are happy to accept the responsibility of making backups of your data; you can use “Personal Storage” that is contained within your LAN e.g. no connection to the Internet required.
Storing “Disk Images” in the Cloud is basically a non starter because a “Disk Image” is usually upwards of 5GB. For most people a “Disk Image” will be likely in the 40 / 50 GB range so even with a super fast connection, it will take many hours to upload to a Cloud facility that has enough storage capacity for these huge files.
You can create a robust and reliable Personal Storage device without much technical knowledge see Personal storage Non “Cloud” article but you also need to look at “Disk Image” & “Data backups”.
In closing,
Cloud services (Storage and computing) offer many advantages and provide a robust and secure method of storing your data (photos etc) but need a reliable “Internet” connection.
Cloud services mostly use the www, often to create a secure “portal” to enable you to access your data