LGBT Senior’s Tech Talk: Photos, Files and the Cloud (Where Did My Stuff Go?)
By Mark McNease
I can remember when ‘the cloud’ was a new thing, and most people didn’t know what it was or what it meant. Now it’s an inescapable part of our technology landscape. Everything, it seems, is in the cloud, and the cloud itself is spoken of as a singular, godlike place – maybe even heaven – where everything resides and nothing is forgotten.
I still don’t trust it completely, and it requires an internet connection. Its name fits it: the cloud does not exist on our computers, smartphones, or laptops. It seemingly lives ‘up there’ somewhere (keep reading for more on that), and it’s apparently limitless.
I keep my files and photos on my desktop, laptop and phone. Some of them are backed up, which is especially helpful with all the Word and Excel documents I create. Photos? Not so much. They take up a lot of space, and space isn’t free. I don’t really need six pictures of the same thing, the way we tend to take them now with our phones, or even most of the ones I accumulate by the thousands.
So what, exactly, is this cloud? And where did it come from? Can it rain on me? Can it make my life difficult? (Sometimes the answer to that depends on a reliable WiFi connection.) Let’s dive in …
You took a photo at your best friend’s birthday party. It was a good one, everybody’s happy, she’s blowing out the candles. You want to find it later and it’s gone. Or it’s somewhere, but you can’t figure out where. Meanwhile your phone keeps telling you your storage is full, and your computer is asking you to back something up, and there’s a little icon that looks like a cloud sitting in your menu bar doing who knows what.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone. And none of it is your fault. The people who design these systems assume you already know things they never bothered to explain.
What Is “the Cloud,” Really?
The cloud is not magic. It’s not even a cloud. It’s someone else’s computer. How futuristic is that!
More specifically, the cloud is an enormous building full of computers — called a data center — owned by a company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft. When your phone or computer saves something “to the cloud,” it’s sending a copy of that thing over the internet to one of those buildings, where it gets stored on their computers instead of (or in addition to) yours.
That’s it. That’s the whole mystery.
The reason companies started calling it “the cloud” is because on old technical diagrams, the internet was drawn as a cloud shape — a fuzzy blob that represented everything out there that wasn’t your own computer. The name stuck. The fuzziness, unfortunately, stuck too. It makes it hard for people to imagine, and more often than not I still think of it as “up there” somewhere, perhaps in a parallel universe.
Who needs a cloud, anyway?
We do, actually, because our phones and computers have limited space, and because life is unpredictable. If you’ve ever had the power go out and lost something you were writing on your computer, you know how much of a lifesaver ‘auto save’ is. Or in case you computer crashes completely, at least some of what was on it can be recovered if it was sent to cloud heaven.
Think of it this way. Your phone is like your wallet. You carry it with you, it holds what you need day to day, but you wouldn’t keep your entire life savings in it. The cloud is more like a safe deposit box at the bank. It holds the important stuff, and you can access it whenever you need to, from almost anywhere.
The cloud also protects you when things go wrong. If you drop your phone in the pool or your laptop gets stolen, anything saved to the cloud is still there, waiting for you on whatever device you use next. Without the cloud, that photo of your granddaughter might be gone forever.
Where Are My Photos?
This is the question that causes the most confusion, and it comes down to which phone you have.
If you have an iPhone, your photos are probably in iCloud — Apple’s cloud service. When your phone is connected to WiFi, it quietly sends your photos up to iCloud in the background. You can see them in the Photos app on your phone, and if you go to icloud.com on any computer and sign in with your Apple ID, you can see them there too.
If you have an Android phone, your photos are probably backed up to Google Photos, which does essentially the same thing. You can find them at photos.google.com on any computer.
The catch — and there is always a catch — is that both services give you a limited amount of free storage. Once you hit that limit, they stop saving new photos unless you pay for more space or delete old things. That’s often what’s happening when your phone says storage is full. That’s why I don’t backup my photos into the cloud. I’d rather just delete them.
What About My Files and Documents?
Same idea, different boxes. And this one is most important to me as a writer. I spend countless hours working on a new book or project, and I can’t afford to lose the work because of a power surge. (Note: I also back up many of my documents onto flash drives for the same reason.)
Apple has iCloud Drive for documents and files. Microsoft has OneDrive, which is built into Windows computers. Google has Google Drive. All three work the same basic way: files you save there get copied to the cloud and become accessible from any device where you’re signed in.
The tricky part is that these services sometimes move your files into cloud storage without making it entirely clear they’ve done so. You go looking for a document on your computer and it seems to have vanished — but it’s actually sitting in your OneDrive or iCloud Drive, waiting for you to open the right folder.
If you’re on a Windows computer, look for a folder called OneDrive in your file explorer. On a Mac, look for iCloud Drive. On either, look for files with a small cloud icon next to them — that means the file is stored online but not currently downloaded to your computer. Click it and it’ll download.
Do I Have to Use the Cloud?
No. But it helps. You can still save photos and files directly to your computer or an external hard drive the old-fashioned way, and plenty of people do. The cloud just adds a layer of safety and convenience — especially for photos, which are often irreplaceable.
If you’re going to use it, the most important thing is knowing which cloud service you’re using and how to get back into it. That means knowing your Apple ID and password, or your Google account, or your Microsoft account. Write them down somewhere safe. Not on your computer — on paper, in a place only you know. Losing access to your account is far more common than losing the files themselves.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
You can look at your photos from any computer. If you’re at a friend’s house or on a cruise ship with a computer, just go to icloud.com or photos.google.com, sign in, and there they are.
Deleting from one place deletes from everywhere. If your phone and computer are synced to the same cloud account, deleting a photo on your phone will delete it from the cloud — and from every other device. Be intentional about what you delete.
“Syncing” means keeping everything the same. When your phone “syncs” with the cloud, it’s making sure everything matches. New photos go up, nothing gets left behind. It happens automatically, usually while you sleep and your phone is charging.
Your storage isn’t unlimited. Apple gives you 5GB free. Google gives you 15GB. Microsoft gives you 5GB. Photos eat up storage fast. When you get the warning, you have three options: pay for more storage (usually a few dollars a month), delete things you don’t need, or start saving photos somewhere else, like an external hard drive.
In conclusion
The cloud is just storage — off-site, automatic, and accessible from anywhere. It’s trying to be helpful. It’s just not very good at explaining itself.
Your photos are not gone. Your files are not gone. They’re in a box, and now you know roughly where to find the key.
If you’re still not sure where something went, ask someone you trust to sit with you for twenty minutes and trace it together. There’s no shame in that. These systems were built by engineers in their thirties who forgot that not everyone grew up
Start with this. You’re not behind. You’re just starting from a different place.
Tech Talk is a regular feature at LGBTSr exploring and explaining technology for the masses.