Tech Talk: Head in the clouds

INTERWEBS—From between seemingly ceaseless snowflakes and bouts of sledding, we can agree that now is an excellent time to be inside. And while we’ve got all this indoor time on our hands, let’s talk about fun stuff: digital file management. If you’re failing to see the fun, I understand. Digital storage tends to only be a fun subject if you’ve got your ship together, so to speak. If not, the subject comes up with sighs and groans and much chagrin.

Who has the time? No one, but also everyone. It’s true what they say: it’s never too late to start a good habit.

Build new systems now and then the time to go back and retroactively sort old files will come in increments here and there until the project is complete.

Addressing old file storage issues by building organizational tiers in a new platform can be similar to taking out a new loan to consolidate lingering and high interest debt. Is signing up for new loans an everyday option, no, but it can lead to a long-term fix. If you already have good storage habits, expanding into new platforms only adds to the landscape of your digital real estate.

The good news is there may be storage available to you already. Have an Amazon account? Access up to 5 gigabytes of storage for free. The Google Drive suite provides a host of useful apps with 15 gigs of free storage included in the bundle. Even better, any files originating in the Google apps (Docs, Sheets, etc.) don’t count toward the storage allotment. Only data imported from other sources count against the free 15 gigs.

Meanwhile Adobe users have at their disposal 100 gigabytes of included storage. Larger quantities of storage are available for purchase through internet services providers (ISPs), Apple, Google, and more.

But what even is the cloud? Simply stated, cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on “the cloud.” The physical storage spans multiple servers, and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. That description is factual and specific and yet leaves one to wonder, no really, what does the cloud look like?

A long time ago when I lived in Seattle and worked in the mailroom for Centurylink, I was responsible for the mail at two locations, one full of corporate big wigs and the second barely housed anyone, just floors and floors of the ‘cloud’. One of the technicians unlocked the door for me one day so I could see the cloud in person. The similarity to a real cloud was that the environment was chilling, as fans turned off and on to cool the hardware that makes the internet world go round.

It was crisp, but instead of the effervescent air of a cumulonimbus, what I saw behind the perfectly ordinary door was unending towers of computer servers aligned in a grid. The building spanned a city block, and the grid of towers spanned several floors. All was well, they all seemed to have flashing-green lights, and every few rows there was a technicians’ station stocked with spare parts and tools for times when the lights flashed red.

Most of the servers hosted there were owned by bigwig companies, but ordinary citizens were also permitted to house and maintain their servers on the premises. As a result, all these privately owned servers needed to be caged and locked up for security purposes.

Towers of information locked in an innocuous downtown building, locked in a room, and locked in a cage. If you ask me, the cloud looks like the perfect setting for the next installment of The Matrix.

The amount of storage available to you could be enough to power your next creative project. Video and especially complex audio editing files are large and are best saved to external storage devices and drives to avoid bogging down local memory.

Good habits for file saving include a universal file naming convention that consistently relays as much information as possible. Avoid special characters or spaces in a file name. Use capitals, dashes and underscores instead of periods or spaces or slashes.

Use date format ISO 8601: YYYYMMDD. Images that come out of the camera with file names like DSC 1099 or IMG 4997 aren’t as helpful as 2021-02-14_Snow Avalanche_videoclips. This system leaves room to include a version number as images are edited for different projects.

With everything in its place, you’ll know digital peace.