Given its prevalence in modern life, it would be easy and fair to assume that the cloud provides an unlimited means of storing data for easy access. Of course, nothing in this life is truly unlimited, and cloud storage is no exception. Rather than being literally unlimited, it might be more accurate to say that cloud storage is “realistically” unlimited, as it has sufficient capacity to store a typical amount of data of the average user, especially in a frequent use scenario.
Cloud storage doesn’t work like you might think, it’s not a magical, ephemeral space where data can be stored infinitely. Instead, it’s made up of huge amounts of actual physical servers, constantly keeping your data in an easily accessible state. It may not be that difficult to get up to several terabytes of storage on a small drive, but when millions of users around the world are storing and retrieving files simultaneously, even hundreds of terabytes aren’t enough. This is why, even though cloud storage services offer plans with large amounts of space, they are not truly unlimited, and why older storage formats, like disk-based hard drives, are still used to store data long-term.
Consumer cloud storage is capped for convenience
Several large cloud storage service providers like Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox offered “unlimited” plans, primarily for large organizations that needed space for ever-growing file repositories. However, both services removed their unlimited plans in 2023, capping even the highest subscriptions at between 1 and 5 terabytes.
Cloud storage is facilitated by physical data servers, typically located in huge server farms networked with other facilities around the world. This is a storage considered “elastic” because it is relatively easy to scale. If a provider needs more space, they buy more disks and servers. However, millions of users around the world are accessing the servers at any given time, which is an incomprehensible amount of data to move at once. Even though a sufficiently funded service could, in theory, continue to scale to meet changing demands, sooner or later it will run out of space for all those servers.
This is why consumer cloud storage services are typically limited to several terabytes per user. Realistically, a single user won’t use all the storage capacity, so it is effectively “unlimited”, while the provider keeps plenty of extra space to store and back up other users’ data. In this regard, it is important to avoid these five common mistakes made when using cloud storage.
Data can be stored long term in cold storage
Data sent to consumer cloud storage is typically stored on high-speed SSDs, quickly accessible at any time. This is colloquially called “hot” storage. However, not everyone stores their data for the purpose of daily access. Keeping files that haven’t been touched in months or years in hot storage would be inefficient, so vendors offset the cost by moving older files to “cold” storage.
In this case, providers can move data from high-speed drives to an older hard drive. These hard drives can be disconnected from power and the Internet, so they don’t put as much strain on the system. Typical user files are usually kept exclusively in hot storage, because a random person unable to access their data would be a bad idea for the provider. But cold storage can be used with backups for large organizations to avoid siphoning space from critical servers. There are of course some files that you should never upload to the cloud, but in either case, cloud storage isn’t truly unlimited.
