Can someone explain the cloud to me?

[MrsSnaplegs]

Kind of a "ronseal" question really - as I have asked in the title can someone explain "the cloud" to me?

I understand the basic concept - an externally provided area that data can be stored on.

What are the costs?
How secure is it?
What sites are best for domestic stuff - not work related purely personal?
Can I store photos?
Can I store my itunes library there and access it?
What happens if the site fails? or the company that runs it?

Reason I am asking is our computer is fairly old - 6 years - and we only really use it for photos, itunes, internet and basic games on disneyplayhouse type websites. It is very slow and I know we really need to upgrade. I have recently burnt all our photos to disk which has helped but until I can afford to upgrade the computer I would like to look at storing our data elsewhere.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Photos - I back ours up at www.kodakgallery.co.uk. It's free and a good way of sharing photos with friends overseas. I guess if they went under the data would be lost - but I have copies on the PC as well, so could replicate them and store them somewhere else if needed.

"I understand the basic concept - an externally provided area that data can be stored on."

The Cloud is actually much more than that. It's not just data storage on the internet (which is actually a pretty old idea) but the moving of programs and applications on the internet too. So I might "appear" to log on to a "computer" somewhere but in reality it's in the cloud and doesn't exists as a "real" machine. If that computer needs more power than the Cloud gives it to it as and when required. So instead of buying a really powerful machine to do my invoicing runs once a month the Cloud dynamically makes my "computer" more powerful as and when I need it.

"Can I store my itunes library there and access it?"

If you can find some "cloud" storage that mounts as a normal disk drive on your computer then it possibly could. Off the top of my head I'm not aware of such a thing though. Apple is allegedly working on something in this area though...

"What happens if the site fails? or the company that runs it?"

More than likely you will loose everything. And therein likes the problems of doing anything in the Cloud.

In theory by using Gmail you could e-mail yourself a document, photo and it would be stored in the Google cloud accessed via Gmail. Least I think Gmail is using a cloud.

I've been using Gmail for several years now. A problem with it is when it doesn't work. If I can't get a connection to the server, or the servers are off line, then I don't have e-mail. Not a huge issue if the outage is only for a few hours, more of an issue if it becomes days.

When you log in to your GMail you should see some links at the top of the page such as "Calendar" "Documents" and "Photos". So no need to email photos or documents to yourself, you can store them in Google directly for free - it is very useful! My gmail seems to be reliable - not many outages - but of course very annoying when it does stop working even for a short time. Keeping a local copy is still wise...

OK so not really what I thought it was. Working for a large company with external servers I thought it would be a similar process but clearly not. May need to look at upgrading computer and or new HDD