Someone else's computer, in a shed
Where Is the Cloud?
The cloud is not in the sky. It is a very large building full of computers, with an enormous electricity bill.
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Step 1 of 5
It is a building you could drive to.
Data centres are windowless sheds the size of several football pitches, filled with racks of computers, roaring with fans. Your photos are on a drive in one of them.
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Step 2 of 5
Everything is kept several times over.
Drives fail constantly at that scale, so every file is written to several machines, usually in different buildings. A fire in one building loses nobody's photos.
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Step 3 of 5
Most of the electricity is for cooling.
Computers turn nearly all the electricity they use into heat. A data centre spends an enormous amount more simply moving that heat outside before the machines cook themselves.
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Step 4 of 5
Distance is why it sometimes feels slow.
Even at the speed of light, a request to a building on another continent takes noticeable time. So companies keep copies close to their users, in dozens of places at once.
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Step 5 of 5
It is convenient, and it is not yours.
Cloud storage means never losing a phone's photos and reaching them anywhere. It also means the files sit on a company's machines, under their rules and their outages.
Some data centres are deliberately built in cold countries, or next to a river, purely to make the cooling cheaper.
The short version
The cloud is racks of computers in big cooled buildings, holding copies of your files and sending them over the internet.
Try it yourself
Turn off the internet and open a cloud photo album. What is missing was never really on your phone.
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