Stark warning to anyone who stores photos on the cloud - ignoring it will be costly
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We've all been guilty of taking a picture, dumping it into the cloud, and forgetting all about it. It's a shameful habit that makes the film camera churn in it's grave - and it could end up costing us a fortune. While some of our images hold sentimental value, such as memories of a loved one you've lost, too many of us hold onto pointless content that we will never actually look at or think about again. We're talking old memes that are no longer funny, selfies your annoying ex would send over WhatsApp, and all of the times you've accidentally screenshotted your homepage.
Research from pCloud suggests the average person stores a whopping 500GB of data in their personal cloud storage, with photos and image files taking up the majority (46 per cent). This is equivalent to a whopping 137,237 pictures for just one person, and a colossal leap from a decade ago, where the average user had 630 photos and 24 videos stored on their phone. "Think about it—how many of the photos on your phone do you actually look at?" asks Brenda Beltrán of Holafly. "Yet they're sitting there, duplicated in multiple places, taking up space.".
Perhaps a kind of cognitive dissonance has formed because we can't physically see the data centres that store all of our files. Back in the noughties, all our storage was somewhat tangible. CDs, DVDs, printed images etc took up actual room in our homes, and when it felt like we'd collected too much - we'd simply get rid. But with services like the cloud, that instinct has seemingly vanished. "But it's not free, either for your wallet or the planet," warns Brenda. "Data centres take up a lot of energy, and while companies like Google or Amazon are working on making them greener, the sheer volume of stuff people are storing is staggering.".
