Cloud storage: a journey from Dropbox to today

Today, it is common to save documents, photos or videos in what we call the cloud. Cloud storage is so integrated that sometimes we do not know if we have something stored on our phone, on our computer, or if it is hosted on a Google Drive, Dropbox or Movistar Cloud server . It does not matter, because it is everywhere , always available.

The cloud has been a blessing for those of us who work with different devices . No more having to move files from one place to another, make copies, carry USB sticks, external drives or SD cards. Cloud storage makes it easy for us to save content online and share it with whoever we want . North Korea Email Address

But although we are used to it, services such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Movistar Cloud have little between us. However, everything is going very fast on the Internet and as soon as we adopt a new technology we do not remember how we could live without it .

a journey from Dropbox to today


Cloud storage: a journey from Dropbox to today

Older veterans will remember the tapes and diskettes . The physical format was the only one available to store information and share it from one computer to another. 8 or 5-inch floppy disks that stored tens or hundreds of kilobytes to the 3.5-inch floppy disk, which stored 1.44 MB. Then came the optical disc or CD (700 MB), followed by DVD (4.7 GB).

In parallel, Flash memories managed to store information on a device that could fit in your hand and you could connect to the computer via USB. Not to mention the SD cards , popularized by digital cameras and video cameras, and external drives, today from 2 TB onwards.

But the first precursor to cloud storage is FTP. A protocol that was born in the 70s of the last century and that facilitates the task of storing, sharing and obtaining files between computers. From a server to a client. He also contributed to the development of the World Wide Web . Its popularity only waned with the advent of cloud storage. Until then, there were even those who had their own home FTP server thanks to NAS storage systems or with a simple computer connected all day.

Today the FTP protocol is still used to access the content of other computers, as a private cloud. However, there are alternatives such as SSH, SCP, Samba or WebDAV that also allow access to folders and files remotely, through the Internet.

CompuServe changes everything in cloud storage

What we know today as cloud storage is related to what we call cloud computing . While online file storage is an evolution of FTP in which the user can comfortably access their files from the browser or from dedicated applications, cloud computing represented the leap from computing to the cloud. That is, accessing software, hardware, and files that are miles away.

At first, cloud computing in the late 20th century was limited to web hosting. Moreover, technically it was born in parallel to the Internet , when the first ARPANET network was created in the 1960s. The fact is that over the years came web applications, virtual desktops, online databases and. Today, for example, thanks to the cloud we can access servers and even virtual machines and remote computers .

But for the first Internet users, cloud storage was born in 1983 with CompuServe . Their customers had access to the Internet, newsgroups, mobile lead and shared disk space to fill with files. However, at that time few were those who had access to the Internet.

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