Most people use Hotmail, YouTube and Twitter daily without thinking where the information they are uploading is being stored. It isn’t on your computer or on a server, but on a cloud. No we don’t mean on a cloud in the sky but in “the cloud”.

What is the cloud?

The cloud is the name given to the faraway places where almost all of our online data is stored. They can store any type of data from a word document to a video.

You can access information from the cloud whenever you can access the Internet. All you have to do is login to your account by entering your username and password.

Why is cloud computing becoming more popular?

Cloud computing characterizes today’s Internet; everything is portable, accessible and practical.

It is used so much because it makes good financial sense to store large amounts of data in a single place. Some of the world’s largest tech-companies such as Google and Microsoft have spent millions of dollars building these huge storage spaces.

Most companies are happy to let you use the cloud for free, all you have to do is log on to their server; this can be done from anywhere in the world, the cloud is always hovering above you.

The cloud is also great for businesses as if provides them with a wide customer base to advertise to.

This new method of data storage allows us to store larger amounts of information than ever before. Forget the old days when you email storage limit was just 2Mb, and downloading photos took an age.

Gmail offers its ordinary users an email capacity of 7.39 Gb – a huge amount considering that just a decade ago most computers had hard disc capacities of no more than 1Gb.

What are the problems with the cloud?

Ok, so just imagine that one day everything you ever saved to the cloud disappears; your email, images, tweets, Facebook profile, photos, all of it – gone. This is a frightening possibility with the cloud.

A few years ago Microsoft constructed a beast of a building in Quincy, in the middle of Washington state. This place holds 300,000 servers, containing millions of data files, and has been described as “the belly of the modern Internet”.

What if Quincy, or Data-ville as if is sometimes referred to as, suffered a disaster? What if there was a flood or some other natural disaster and all our memories got washed away with the bricks of this Microsoft building? We would loose everything.

This happened not that long ago to a bookmark-sharing website called Magnolia. The service lost its primary store of user data as well as its backup, poof, gone, just like that! The company spent a few days trying to salvage what they could but eventually shut down. Scary thought.

Should I trust the cloud?

You can trust the cloud, but maybe not with your life! Cloud computing has made the modern Internet what it is today and without it we wouldn’t be able to do many tasks that we now take for granted.

You must remember that by entering data into the cloud you are entrusting it to someone else and if your data is then lost, there isn’t much you can do about it.

The cloud is a brilliant thing which should be, and probably is, used by almost everyone. Just make sure you backup any data that you upload via a portable hard drive and keep copies of all documents and photos.

Embrace the cloud, just don’t rely on it for everything.