Ask ten people to describe the cloud and you’ll get ten different answers. Some might say it’s a mysterious place where your files go to disappear. Others would say it’s a server. Many assume it’s a place to store your photos so you can delete them from your device. 

The most accurate answer, though, is that the cloud is a piece of technology we all rely on but few of us truly understand.

So in this post, let’s explore the basics of just what the cloud is—and what it isn’t.

We’re going to keep things very simple, so let’s start by thinking about storage as nothing more than a bucket. It’s a bucket you put things into and take things out of. That’s as straightforward as it gets. 

Every device you buy comes with its own built-in bucket, whether it’s a phone, a tablet, an Xbox, a printer, or an external hard drive. Pretty much any piece of hardware you can think of.

The buckets are different sizes (your phone’s bucket is probably smaller than your computer’s) but they all do basically the same thing. They hold stuff.   

That stuff might be your files, photos, contacts, apps you download, and so on. Part of the bucket is also used by your device’s operating system, which is the files your device uses to turn itself on and run.

So what does this have to do with the cloud? Well, at its most basic level, the cloud is exactly the same as the bucket on your phone. It’s nothing more than a place to store files or photos or software; a place to put things in or take them out.

You can’t see it or hold it. It’s not built in to a device you can hold in your hand. And despite being called the cloud, it’s not even a bucket in the sky. Instead, your cloud storage is one tiny bucket sitting in a corner of a massive computer owned by someone else.

That someone is usually a corporation like Apple or Google or Microsoft, and if you have an account with them you get to put things in that bucket for free. If you want a bigger bucket, you pay. In some cases, a company’s only product is cloud storage, sort of like a physical storage facility rents out space by the month or year.

So far, so good. The confusion, though, is in how the two buckets are connected. If you put a photo into the bucket on your phone, how does it get into the bucket in the cloud?

It helps to think of the connections between the buckets as a tap. Turning on the cloud settings on your device is like turning on a tap to let things flow through. 

Take your phone, for example. Turn on all the backup settings and the stuff in your phone’s bucket flows through the tap and into the bucket in the cloud. Turn on some of the backup settings (say, photos) and leave others turned off (say, contacts), and only the taps that are open will let stuff flow through. 

In this example, my Contacts (and everything else with a green toggle) will pour into the bucket in the cloud but my Stocks and Wallet won’t.

And here’s the thing to understand: no matter how many folders or apps you decide to turn on the taps for, your buckets all want to hold the same stuff. They want to stay synchronized. 

Put a photo into the bucket on your phone and it pours a copy of that photo into your bucket in the cloud. Delete a file from the bucket on your laptop and it gets deleted from your bucket in the cloud. Just like those couples that always dress the same, everything likes to match.

So no, sending a file or photo to your bucket in the cloud does not mean that you can delete it from your phone. Remove it from one bucket, it’s gone from the other. (There are paid cloud services that let you store things in a separate, unsynchronized bucket, sort of like a vault, but we’re sticking to basics here.)

The point is that the cloud is your backup. Drop your phone into a lake and all your precious files are safe, waiting to be poured out of your cloud bucket and into your new device—provided, of course, that you turned on the taps in the first place.

Photo by Arteum.ro on Unsplash