What is Cloud Storage and How Does It Work

So we’re going to go over cloud services and specifically how they relate to data storage.

What cloud service does is – make services available to users on demand via the internet from a cloud computing provider’s servers. It’s basically broken down into these four types software data platform and storage.

We have now transitioned from using USB drives to using service like Google Drive, One Drive and Dropbox. Flash drive have a place, however there is a responsibility to keep it safe and secure.

Cloud based storage can be accessed by mobile, laptop and computers from any location as long as you have internet connection.

How To Setup Cloud Storage

For loggin- in and getting set-up on any of these cloud internet storage providers, you just need to provide your personal information, your email address and a password. You’re going to be saving and downloading files from the cloud. You’re going to want to make sure that you have a good password because anything that you save to the cloud can be hacked into, if you have a weak password. They’ll have access to your files, your personal information and your email address. These days almost all service signup pages recommend you to use a strong password – unless you ignore the warning and setup a weak password.

Make sure you have a great password, such as a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

If you decide to use Microsoft Windows, they will give you five gigs of free data, as part of their free service plan for individual use.

Google Drive

If you use an Android device, you’ll notice that it’s automatically downloaded with Google Drive. Google Drive is great because it has 15 gigs of free data that you can use for free storage.

iCloud

iCloud is great too because with iCloud if you’re an iPhone user you can upload photos to iCloud as well as any other files.

Dropbox

They offer two gigs of free service, you can use dropbox offline if you have downloaded the app on your phone or an application on the computer. Dropbox also gives you extra storage if you refer Dropbox to your friends using the invite option within.

Saving data on these provider servers means you are not saving data on your own computer and that’s a benefit, it’s going to save that storage space on your computer.

This also improves disaster recovery as users save data on the cloud and you don’t really have to worry that your computer or hard drives become faulty. On a normal computer often you can not recover data due to corruption or physical damage to your hard drive. However, in the instance of cloud you’ll be able to access it from any device from your cloud account. Cloud services also run multiple backup servers on their end so that if any of the storage drives on the cloud goes bad, there’s always another backup file to serve you data when you need it.

Cloud Storage Let’s You Collaborate On Projects

Cloud also offers a great features for collaboration when you’re working on with a team or group projects. A lot of times you want to share your documents with your peers and now you don’t want to take a flash drive and share those documents back and forth. It’s much easier to just create a document or save a document to the cloud and share that document with other people on the cloud.

What Are The Disadvantages or Cons

Cloud storage does have some drawbacks. It is good practice to save important data on multiple accounts.

Internet Connection

If you do not have an internet connection, or if your internet service provider is down for whatever reason, you’re not going to actually have access to your files at that time.

Uploading

Uploading is a must process of transferring data from your computer to the cloud. On all cloud services, you will see the universal upload symbol. Using this you must upload your data before it becomes available for future use or for collaboration purposes. Some cloud services such as Dropbox allows a sync option which basically updates your files on the cloud as you save them on an allocated folder on your personal computer.

Downloading

Downloading is the process of receiving data from the cloud to your computer.
I hope this explains what cloud-based storage is, how it works and what you need to get started. If you have any questions then definitely put them in the comments section below and I’d be happy to respond to any of the questions that you might have.