17 April—It’s a cloudy morning in Litchfield, so today’s disquisition will be on cloud storage. For those readers who have more important things to think about, cloud storage is a system—the digital trade calls it a model—of computer data storage in which your digital data—all the crap you’d normally keep on your computer or other so-called local storage—are stored remotely on computers other than your own, quite possibly in countries other than the United States.

Cloud storage has been used in one way or another since the Defense Department’s ARPANET (progenitor of the internet) in the sixties. (Is that the one Albert Gore Jr. invented? I forget.) In 1983 CompuServe (remember it?) commercialized cloud storage in a small way, followed by AT&T in 1996 in a somewhat bigger way, Amazon in 2006, and many others since. Amazon is currently the biggest cloud storage provider, followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba (headquartered in Bad China), Oracle, and IBM.

You can get free cloud storage or pay for it, depending upon the provider and how much data you store. Advocates claim that the cloud is better than local storage on or attached directly to your computer because it’s not only cheaper, but also safer and more secure thanks to encryption algorithms.

On the other hand, didn’t Western Digital’s My Cloud storage go down for over a week earlier this month, due to a cyberattack? Don’t worry about that because it’s not supposed to happen. So you should also not worry that Facebook, Alibaba, and LinkedIn are among several others that have been hacked.

While enormous cloud data centers and server farms with countless banks of gargantuan surrogate computers all over the world may not consume—make that waste—quite as much energy as absolutely ridiculous blockchain cryptocurrency mining, it nevertheless takes lots and lots of electricity to keep cloud-storage facilities running.

My current computer has one-and-a-half terabytes of solid-state-disc (sorry, disk) storage built in, down from two terabytes in its predecessor; the better part of a terabyte is fallow, waiting to be used, along with several USB drives of various capacities, used mainly for backup. So I’m obviously not a power user. But even if I were a power user, I’d feel a lot more secure with all the stuff on my computer (on my computer it’s certainly not crap) staying on my computer unless I want to send it somewhere else for a reason other than storage.

(And why are those solid-state storage things called discs or disks when they’re not round?)

Not that there’s any real privacy or security in the digital age anyway. Of course, I remember 1.2-megabyte 5.25-inch floppy diskettes, 1.44-megabyte 3.5-inch floppies, and 20-megabyte hard discs. And blissfully simple life in the halcyon days BC—before computers . . .