When I use the web interface to get my data from the cloud, how does the cloud know where it put my data? There’s a lot of information on how the cloud stores your data, but not how the cloud keeps track of your data.
In: Technology
Because the cloud IS where you store your data. Basically, the cloud is just multiple servers hosting data and giving access to those trough the internet
“The cloud” is just marketing speak for “Someone else’s server”. When you ask “The cloud” for information you’re actually asking a specific service for it. It’s not a vague pool of information, you’re directly asking “drive.google.com” for a specific file associated with a specific account. The server at Google Drive has a database that tells it exactly where every file is on disc and it will happily fetch it for you.
The cloud knows where your data is because whatever computer(s) you’re asking for your data are programmed to know or how to find out which database or file server has the requested data.
It is essentially just a big publicly available computer. Each username gets its own storage space, so when you go to it (using the app or website), you log in using your username, automatically or manually, and that is how it knows what data to show you.
It is essentially just a big publicly available computer. Each username gets its own storage space, so when you go to it (using the app or website), you log in using your username, automatically or manually, and that is how it knows what data to show you.
It is essentially just a big publicly available computer. Each username gets its own storage space, so when you go to it (using the app or website), you log in using your username, automatically or manually, and that is how it knows what data to show you.
“The Cloud” is a giant application for sharing server resources in front of some data centers. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and a few others run cloud services.
Each of these cloud providers have various mechanisms for storing files. For instance, Amazon offers the S3 Bucket storage. They essentially have a giant set of data storage servers for the files, and then a database backed frontend application. When you access the files, you ask that frontend application for the file, it asks its database for the file location, and then it accesses the actual file servers.
The key is that the system is so streamlined, and that the cloud providers give software developers great libraries for integrating the storage. This enables it to be seamlessly integrated into other applications.
“The cloud” just means “someone *else’s* computer”. A key part of “saving something to the cloud” is keeping track of where it is – that’s one of the things that the interface is doing, invisibly to you.
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