The Digital Universe — a construct created by over two billion people using mobile phones, digital cameras, and traditional PCs, as well as by millions of enterprises and equally myriad sensors sending and receiving data over the internet — contains almost as many bits as there are galaxies in the observable universe.
And like the physical universe, it is expanding fast, doubling in size every two years to reach 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020, according to IDC.
This manmade universe now contains the record-breaking 35.6 million tweets about Brazil’s astonishing 7-1 defeat to Germany during their recent World Cup semi-final match. It also holds the 1.26 billion music track downloads from paid services in 2013, the over 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day, and the 1 billion hours of videos streamed from Netflix every month.
A good portion of this Digital Universe has double citizenship, living not only in the Internet, but also in our personal devices. The photos we upload to Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram, as well as the videos we upload to YouTube or Vine, exist both in the cloud and in our computers, tablets, and smartphones, occupying precious space that often runs out, leaving us with the cumbersome task of deciding what gets deleted and what gets moved someplace else.
One of the alternatives to storing content locally on a PC or other mobile device is the cloud. If you have been using webmail — such as Gmail or Hotmail — your emails are already in the cloud. The idea of cloud computing is to make applications and data available online to several different people, wherever they may be based. Other Web services, such as backup, mapping, search, and ecommerce are all based on applications stored and run from the cloud.
But when it comes to storing our personal files, we now have personal cloud services. These offer the possibility of accessing our data anywhere, anytime, and from any connected device, as long as we are online. There are today a growing number of such services available, from specialist startups like Dropbox, Evernote, and AudioBox, or from well-established companies like Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
Some of these personal cloud services specialise in particular types of content, excluding other types. As an example, Evernote is geared toward storing photos and text files, while AudioBox allows its users to store music and video, but not pictures. They also offer free storage up to a certain size, after which the user needs to subscribe to the service.
There are other advantages to utilizing personal cloud services that go beyond finding extra room for our private content and the commodity of being able to access it from a variety of devices wherever we may be. Such services remove the need for local and periodic data backup, and can also be a safer option than having sensitive content stored in a device that could be damaged or even stolen.
On the other hand, fully embracing such services is not entirely practical at present, as they require us to rely on the availability of a high-speed data network wherever or whenever we need to access our files. There is also no guarantee that the service will be always available, as the companies providing it may eventually be victims of cyberattacks or other disasters, such as the electrical storms that took down Amazon.com servers in 2012, disrupting the services of Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest.
So, the reality is that users are adopting personal cloud services gradually, storing some content in the cloud while keeping other content locally in their devices. Furthermore, there are still concerns regarding the security and privacy of content stored in the cloud. The overall perception is that by subscribing to these services, the user may be giving up control of the data, which will be stored in distant servers spread across the world. For that reason, it would not be possible to guarantee that when a user chose to delete a file, it would really be gone.
Finally, if the user requires more than the free space allowance provided, they would have to consider baring the cost of subscribing to the service, which can be far more expensive than physical storage. For instance, the cost of the yearly subscription for 100GB at Dropbox is $199.
So, what if rather than relying on big companies — or specialised ones — to store our data in the cloud, we could each have our own personal cloud physically next to us, in the comfort of our homes? That is the reasoning behind the concept of personal cloud storage, now being offered by companies that specialise in the personal storage space.
Their personal cloud storage solutions offer different ways to connect to our content, both locally and remotely. They also offer a variety of remote access apps for most smartphone operating systems. All of them consist of devices small enough to fit on a desk or a bookshelf, and all provide data encryption and password protection. Finally, none of them use WiFi, instead relying on a wired Ethernet connection to a router.
However, personal cloud storage holds one serious disadvantage: given that our content would all be stored in a single physical device, and that our houses are unfortunately not completely calamity proof, the only way to make sure the content is completely safe would be to keep a backup in another physical location or — and here we are again — the cloud.
IDC predicts that in the not-so-distant future personal clouds will replace the personal computer, at least when it comes to storing content. Until then, we will continue to store our videos, photos, music, and other important documents across our many differently devices, happily hoping that the day will never come when we need a backup restore.
The columnist is group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
