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| Public domain image by 200 degreess on Pixabay |
The "Cloud" conjures up an image of a futuristic, esoteric, floating entity, high above our heads (I see the clouds in The Simpsons opening sequence!), but in reality, information from our smartphones and other devices stored in the cloud actually resides in data centres. These are big industrial buildings, with large numbers of racks or cabinets of servers, effectively hard drives or solid-state drives and their auxiliary networking and telecommunications hardware. To make data bulletproof, multiple redundancy is built into cloud storage so that any piece of data is duplicated over multiple systems, possibly in different geographical locations. In this clip from Today With Claire Byrne, Colm Ó Mongáin talks to technology journalist Adam Maguire about data clutter, old and hoarded files and the ever-increasing demand for more storage.