A Different Kind of Cloud

I just saw this commercial and now I’m wondering – did we change the definition of what The Cloud really is, or have I just not known what it was all along???

The product is basically an external hard drive that’s accessible over the Internet – neat idea for the everyday user, but is anything connected to the Internet considered part of “The Cloud” nowadays?

I always pictured cloud storage to be online, distributed storage … redundant, in big data centers … in general, more reliable than just a consumer hard drive sitting underneath my desk. Backing up my family photos and important documents to the cloud means that if I have a fire, or a power surge, or somebody breaks in and steals my computer, all of those files are still safe.

Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox – those are cloud services.

Maybe if it did something neat like auto-syncing to a real data center for free online backups – that would be the cloud, but this … this is just a network-shared hard drive where the Internet happens to be your network. 😛

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