Cloud Storage – Thought grazing

What would turn out to be our last hybrid meeting

I started off the meeting with an apology for not doing the notes from our last meeting on the 8th December. I had the beginnings of a cold on that day, and the notes I took were indecipherable by the time I had recovered after Christmas.

I briefly went through the latest News – not that there was much as Jonathan and Paul attested to as well. Their additions to Flipboard and mine can be found here.

I then asked the group to consider using the Forums/Topics area on the website as an addition (not a replacement) to using Signal for issues that might be of interest to reference in the future. I suggested that Signal might best be used for getting quick responses to issues, and then copied to the most appropriate Forum as a Topic later. Or … perhaps just add them as a Topic if no response was immediately required and you just wanted to promote discussion on a Topic. I stated that I’d be reviewing the structure of the Forums and the Topics within them [Update: now completed], and that I would also be looking back at posts on the website that I thought ought to be promoted more for easy reference and access [Update: now done under Blog posts menu item].

I proposed to the group that we might review the way the group was working, and to discontinue doing hybrid zoom meetings which I was finding quite stressful. The group agreed with my proposal which I later circulated as an email …

I am grateful to those of you who attended the meeting yesterday and who accepted my suggestion to re-structure the programme of meetings for the Group.

We will still meet on the Second and Fourth Thursdays of the month at 2:00pm at SightLife, but without a Zoom hybrid component. Doing this was becoming a stressful addition to the meeting that I was finding it hard to work with, so I felt that if the group was going to flourish in the future we had to find a different way of working.

What I came up with, and which was agreed by the members present, was the splitting of the discussion/advice/issues component from the presentational/information component, so that the first will take place on the Second Thursday of the month, and the second will take place on the Fourth Thursday of the month. Doing this will mean that I don't need to prepare stuff for more more than one meeting a month - and I am keen to encourage others to "present" also; and I need not "chair" every discussion-style meeting - concentrating just on taking notes and inputting thoughts, inmformation or even sharing advice!

To support the Zoomers and maybe even extending the online community, a Zoom meeting will take place on the First Thursday of the month. This will essentially be a discussion-style meeting, but it's up to members to take it in any direction they wish. I will host this meeting from the comfort of my own home, with technology I'm more confident with.

Yesterday, I talked about "How the Internet works", and I'll be sharing an updated post on the subject, on the website asap. At our first proper "presentation-style" meeting in a fortnight I will be talking about "Home networking" - updating the various sessions we've had over the past 6 years or so. There should be time for anyone to raise a pressing issue/problem at the end so we're not dispensing with that and we will still do a News and Follow-up bit; we just won't go "round the table/screen" seeking input as we've done in the past two years (plus).

I'm looking for suggestions for other "presentation-style" subjects. I have it in mind to do one on photo-sharing in February, but any other ideas are welcome. Just drop me a line.

Finally, I'll be providing a bit more structure to the website so that the more useful posts are more easily found; and I'm also encouraging members to use the Forums and Topics, and you will see some changes to the Forums provided over the next two weeks. I don't want to replace our use of Signal. It's brilliant for keeping in touch and getting instant answers to problems; but I am keen to capture some of the issues/solutions as Topics so that they can be more easily retrieved. I am also keen to encourage members to start their own Topics and for all members to participate with Comments and Replies.

Apologies for the length of the message. I hope you all understand where I'm coming from. I'm confident that with these changes the group will be invigorated and work even better than it has in the past.

Then after totally confusing some of you in attempting to describe how I’d sorted out my son’s network (changing a router to a bridged connection, and creating a single WiFi network with one SSID is the quick description of what I did), I moved on to showing three short videos which aimed to explain “How the Internet works” …

These three videos I think provide a sound basis for understanding how information gets to you when you send an email, or do a search from your browser, or use an app on your phone to buy something. An earlier article on the public Thought grazing covers the ground too – I aim to update it shortly. This forms the basis for helping us to start looking at our Home networks and how they work, how they perform, and whether there is anything you can do to make them perform better. That’s for the next session – our first presentation-style meeting, on the 26th January.

You might be interested in reading this article which explains a number of terms used in the workings of the internet, and in the discussion of the videos the term “net neutrality” came up. I may have not fully explained why this is important, so again an article to read – if you’re interested; and a video, which I can recommend, which explains why net neutrality is a good thing, to watch …

Vimeo video on Net neutrality which they are supportive of (unlike Google & YouTube)

As the meeting closed Ian asked about Backups on Apple Mac kit. I strongly suggested there was an inbuilt, free, solution offered by Apple called Time Machine which he should investigate with an external hard disk. I offered the opinion that this was much better than cloud backup solutions which were slow and which would slow down other internet activity you might be doing. This is not to say that cloud storage is not important – I use iCloud, Google Drive and have used Dropbox and One Drive in the past – but it should be mainly thought of (imho) as a way of sharing documents (in the widest sense) between systems, between users and for long-term storage (archiving) of important documents.

Attending my first meeting of the Cardiff University of the Third Age (U3A) Computer Group, I offered to write some notes to accompany the talk that was given on Data Storage in the Cloud by David Reeves. So here goes …
Computing has moved a long way from the days when all you stored on your computer were words and numbers. Gradually this has been extended to include first pictures, then audio, and then video. With the addition of these media so the requirements for memory to store them increased first by needing an increase in the Random Access Memory (RAM) that the computer had so that you could actually view or listen to the media, and then in the disk storage you needed to hold and recall the images or music at a later date.

This need for additional storage meant first the introduction of floppy disks, then hard disks inside the computer, then external hard disks connected usually to a USB port on your computer and then flash drives which you could carry around with you and then connect to a USB port on your computer.

With the changes in technology, so the amounts of information stored by each device increased. To give you an idea of how much this has changed you might like to look at the table below – which is actually out of date because you can now get both USB Memory Sticks and Hard Drives considerable larger than those quoted here.

If you want to read more about Information Storage including some technologies I’ve not discussed here such as CD/DVDs you could follow this link or this one, but there’s far more information in these articles than you need to understand why it might be a good idea to store information away from your computer – in the cloud.

Before we do that it might be a good idea to raise an issue that storing all this data causes – what happens if the device breaks, gets corrupted in some way, or just simply gets lost! Now, computer professionals have always done back-ups of their stored data (or they should have done), but the home computer user has never really put a value on their data UNTIL they lose it. So backing-up your data (stored information – words, numbers, images, music and videos) is actually an ESSENTIAL part of owning a computer. This article describes the various ways you might consider backing-up your data but at the bottom of the list is Cloud Storage and that’s where I’m going to take you now.

Wouldn’t it be great if every time you saved a picture, word processed document, spreadsheet … whatever, a copy was automatically made and stored away from your computer so whatever might happen to your computer, the most important part of it – the information it stored – was safe. That’s the essential value of Cloud Storage and the most important reason for using it. We’ll turn to the second most important reason – sharing information with others – later.

There are a number of Cloud Storage options you can use for free as long as you keep your storage below a certain limit. You can use as many as you want to and you might consider using different providers for different purposes. For instance I use Google Drive mainly for Photo Storage, Apple’s iCloud for documents, and Dropbox for sharing stuff. [I’ll maybe explain why I do this in another post.] The other main provider is Microsoft with their OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offering, I don’t tend to use this much, but the principles for using it are much the same as the others.

So how do you use them? As I said above, the principles for each are much the same. I will use Google as the main example, and provide links to the others as well.

Google Drive. You will need a Google Account. This is a good idea in any case as it allows you to create another eMail account – I’m a strong advocate for having more than one eMail address anyway (see Point 3 in this post). Go to Google Accounts to setup your Google ID – you can use your existing eMail address if you want to. Then with your account set up you can go to this page. I would suggest you download the applications for your desktop as well as setting it up for your browser. Installing the application on your Windows PC, or your Apple Mac, will then create a Folder in which you can store information and which then will then be backed-up to your Google Drive “in the cloud”. Voila – you have peace of mind that your precious information has been saved. Any changes you make to the information will be synchronised with the version saved on your cloud storage.

For Dropbox go to this link and create your account, perhaps using the Google email address you’ve just created above – a lot of services allow you to link to your Google ID and this means you don’t have to remember lots of IDs and Passwords.

If you’re an Apple user (iMac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, etc) it makes sense to use iCloud. Even if you’re not, you can still add an iCloud Drive to your desktop and access the 5Gb of free storage you’re provided with “in the cloud”.

If you’re a Microsoft (Windows and Office) user it makes sense to use OneDrive. Like iCloud you get 5Gb of free storage from this link. You may also find that you are offered the option of installing OneDrive when you install Microsoft Office (or Office 365).

Finally sharing information with others. I don’t think I can improve on David’s demonstration and on this YouTube video …

I’ve focussed on using a Folder on your desktop/laptop machine to backup or synchronise files to your Cloud Storage. Remember also that David demonstrated how you can Upload a file using your web browser (I would recommend using Google Chrome) from your desktop to your Cloud Storage.