Storage, up there [waves arm wildly]

[MichaelFinnigan]

OK so i've heard of 'the cloud', indeed i believe my iphone does something that involves it, but i do not understand it.

What i want / need, is storage elsewhere, as in not on my laptop or external hard drive for my many 1000s of photos.

am i correct in thinking there are various providers of such a service? and if this is the case can anyone recommend the best / cheapest or even just give a few pointers of what to look for or some names so I can do a bit more research

thanks

Plenty of free storage out there. A google account comes with gigs of space. Plenty of photo sharing sites like Flikr (don't need to do the sharing bit). The Cloud is really useful!

i've got a google email address, does that mean i've got storage space? and if so how to i access it?

so flikr is cloud stoarge? is anything that allows you to store stuff counted as cloud

Good question OP and one I've been wondering about too.

In fact ds2 (5.7) was marvelling yesterday about how little I understand in the techy world that we now live in!

If I pay apple a nominal sum each year, could I just purchase a small amount of their cloud (which I imagine to be white and fluffy and surrounded by blue sky!) to store all of my photos, music, videos etc on? Would that be more straightforward for me than having bits here and other bits there?

How do I do this (really, really back to basics please!)

i have the additional issue that my laptop is a work one so i cannot install anything on it

i know i should get my own but i can't afford one

I use drop box and Amazon.both v easy & can go from iPhone to cloud. Then you can access on a computer via net if you want

Yes, anything that lets you store things online could be considered 'cloud'.

Cloud storage just means 'store your stuff on our hard drives (servers), instead of on your own hard drive' (well, more or less). So you login at an online location in order to access your files, rather than clicking a folder on your computer.

I like Dropbox, though this uses a dedicated sub folder on your computer. So it might not be ideal if you want to avoid storing anything at all on your computer.

Other choices are google drive, Amazon cloud, Microsoft SkyDrive. If you google for them you should find information on setting up and using an account (all have free options).

You can use dropbox without installing it to your computer (as this is an issue for you) - just access it via the browser and install the app on your phone

Thanks guys

I have got an external hard drive but I worry about that failing too

I shall do a bit of research, I'm much clearer about what this ere cloud is now :)

My computer man (I don't understand it either) put us on to live drive which backs up our whole PC to....somewhere... It's not free though.