What is the cloud?
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You may have heard the term of the cloud in respect of computers, so we are going to look at what is this cloud? Now, the cloud is referring to is an internet-based system for storing files and accessing information. There are lots of different providers of clouds, there could be things like Dropbox, Google Docs, also the file systems within Apple computers. There is loads and loads of them out there. Some of them give free storage up to a certain level and then you have to pay for it on top of that, and as you grow, you can get more and more. For things like Dropbox, you can have a free Dropbox account, but you can also pay for it and you can have anything up to one or two terabytes of data all on your Dropbox account. You can also use the cloud for backing up your photos. So if you have got a mobile phone, you can take your pictures, they are stored in your phone, but it can automatically back up to the cloud. Now, a lot of mobile phones will back up anyway on to the software that you have got built into the phone, but this could be a supplementary one. So you can back them up to Google Photos, you can back up to Dropbox or other providers.
So it means that for every photo you are taking, as soon as you hook onto the internet again, and you can do this just through WiFi, or you can do it through 3, 4 or 5G, it will connect up and it will upload copies of your pictures. So supposing your phone was stolen, your pictures are still safe and they are stored in the cloud. So as far as, do you need a cloud directly when you start with your computer? You don't have to have one, but it is a good way of storing information and taking data off of your computer to avoid filling it up with stuff that you don't really need anymore, you don't want access to all the time. It's so easy now to have a mobile phone and take... Whereas before you might take one or two pictures of something, now you just touch the button and take 10, 20 pictures very, very quickly. So the size of this will fill up a mobile phone, so if you store it on the cloud, you can still access it as long as you are on the internet, you can access all your favourite photos, but you can keep them off of your main phone, therefore saving data.
Now, clouds have differences within them to keep them secure, but obviously, you need to make sure that your passwords and your access to the clouds are kept secure. So don't have a very short password. Always make sure you have quite a long password and something you can remember.