by Gregor 8 Replies latest social current
I am not a tech person but have been interested in all the talk about the CLOUD.
Correct me if I'm wrong -
My computor has memory/storage built in. Tons of stuff, family photos, personal records, my unfinished books. But there are limits. We have added zip drives (like a storage locker?) and try to dump stuff regularly.
If we connected to the cloud we would not need a storage for all this stuff?
Increasingly there has been a shift away from devices that have capability of a ton of local storage but rely on internet connectivity. Tablets, Chromebooks, etc. Some of these devices are replaced every two years like mobile phones. Cloud storage is one way to address backing up information; I can replace my phone whenever, but my Google account has all my contacts, email, and photos (if I choose that setting) stored.
Local backups are great, but 1)most people don't do it or do it regularly enough to be effective; 2)a backup drive stored in the same house as the computer is subject to all the things that could happen to the PC. Theft, fire, disaster, hard drive crash. Also dumping data onto another drive and deleting the original is not a backup.
There are basically two different cloud type services; something like Carbonite intended to serve as a continual offsite backup for all your files, and something like Photobucket, designed to store one type of file like photos.
Also, there is an entertainment industry attempt, as well as a generational trend to shift consumption of content, particularly music, from locally stored digital files to a service (Netflix, Spotify, Pandora) that streams access to the entertainment, never allowing you to 'own' the files to begin with. The obvious downsides are continual cost and the possiblilty the specific content can be removed from the service at any time due to rights/licensing issues.
Traditional apps run on "a computer" whether they are designed for single-use (on a desktop) or multiple users (e.g. a web server).
As the web grew and websites got bigger they can outgrow the capacity of a single server OR you need redundancy to protect against a single machine failing so people would run a cluster of machines.
All these servers had to be ordered in advance for an agreed term but you then get compute power, memory and storage space that you can use as needed.
Sometimes you had sites that needed much more storage space than compute power, memory or vice versa which would mean the others were wasted or making you pay for more than was needed. Also, someone had to manage all these machines which added to the cost.
The cloud is really splitting up resources individually so you can pay for and use each service separately with a lot of automation and protection to make the individual machines powering it all look like a single service.
That's how you can use cloud storage to save photos and just see 'unlimited space' at a very low cost - behind the scenes they are managing the data being replicated onto multiple machines for you.
It's a sea change in computing similar to the change from mainfram -> client server -> web (but really enables 'more web')
Hope that makes sense!
This site will soon be running on a cloud service which will mean it auto-scales (adss and removes computing power as demand gows up and down during the day) which can help reduce costs and make things more reliable. It will also use cloud storage for avatars and embedded images in posts etc... and to store the posts content themselves (no database to manage, upgrade or support).
re: photos, think of your local device as a cache to save the things you've recently been working on. You may have 1016Gb of images in the cloud but 16Gb locally would be more than enough for what you are working on at a time or to save the resized thumbnails with the full sized originals stored securely in the cloud.
One of the key things is that the data is replicated which protects it from disk failure in a way that is very difficult to do locally (certainly at the same price). They even store it in different data centers so if one is hit by an asteroid or burns down your data should still be safe (in theory).
Also, what Simon said; I was addressing it from a simpler consumer perspective.
Yeah, I think more from the server side of things - I think you were talking more about his perspective
To me the best advantages of Cloud services are that all my digital content is backed up in on place and I can access my photos, videos and music with all of my devices - smartphone, tablet and PC. I can also allow others to access some of the content to share photos for example. My TV can also access my cloud service. On a trip I could take picture using my smartphone, load them on the cloud and at home my family can see these pictures moments later.
Cloud services can also store your android apps, contacts and calendar - creating a google account will allow you save and access all that information by simply signing in. I change phones every 3 months and use multiple tablets for work and when I get I new devices all I need is to sign in my google account and all my information is available instantly.
Some cloud services are free, while others offer a free trial period after which you will be charged according to the size of your storage space.
Thanks for the clarification. Interesting changes. I appreciate the heads up about external storage devices. If the house burns down we lose it all anyway.
More likely is that things can be stolen (if they are kept alongside each other) OR a device simply fails and then you're down to a single copy ... and of course computer things always fail in pairs, LOL.
