Digital Disconnect: Cloud, Cloud Everywhere, But Not A Byte To Spare

Let’s dial the clocks back a couple of decades. Once we got hold of external hard disk drives and pen drives/flash drives that allowed us gigabytes — nay, terabytes — of data storage, it seemed nothing would ever stop us from storing as many photos and videos as we need. Sure, Google did allow users to migrate their albums to Google Photos, which was touted as the tech giant’s cross-platform always-online photos service. We need to understand that cloud storage isn’t just some magical thing conjured by a Hogwarts witch but actually is just a collection of hard drives maintained by a service provider, like Google or Apple. Now, if we consider that each of these 1.8 billion users is using the 15GB minimum data limit, Google’s total data that needs to be stored comes up to roughly 27 billion gigabytes.