Your cloud storage is nearly full.” These six words will strike fear into the heart of any digital hoarder –and might prompt some existential questioning. Didn’t I only just buy a load more storage? Can I even remember what is lurking in this elusive cloud, and why I’m clinging on to it? Will I just be paying for more and more gigabytes and terabytes of digital space as I go through life, dragging them around like some invisible burden?
It feels like a great, banal paradox of modern life: we’re always signing up for more storage, and constantly on the verge of running out. iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox: many of us are fully paid-up customers of them all, for a mixture of personal and professional purposes – and the expense can slowly but surely creep up.
A few quid each month might not seem too extravagant. You can secure 50 GB of storage on Apple’s iCloud for 99p per month, 200 GB for £2.99 and so on. Google’s basic plan is similarly priced, offering 100 GB for £1.59 monthly and 200 GB for £2.49. Dropbox offers a massive 2 TB for £9.99 each month. But if you’re locked into subscriptions for a handful of different platforms – say you use a Mac laptop, and back it up using iCloud, but all your digital photos are archived with Google, for example – it can easily add up to hundreds of pounds over the course of a year.
Recent research from phone network O2 suggested that 42 per cent of British mobile phone users pay for additional storage, with millennials paying around six times as much as their boomer counterparts. Photos, videos and unused apps were highlighted as the main storage-hogging culprits. “We’ve all got used to using cloud storage as a digital dumping ground,” says digital strategist and sustainable business coach Adela Mei. “Digital can often mean out of sight, out of mind,” she adds, “until the storage bill comes in”. So is paying for exponentially increasing amounts of storage just a part of life now?
Most of us use some form of digital cloud every day, but few of us properly understand how it works. “Cloud storage allows you to save files, like photos, documents and videos, on the internet instead of on your phone or computer,” explains Professor Tom Jackson, Loughborough University’s co-lead of digital decarbonisation, a movement based around responsible, more efficient use of data in order to minimise potential carbon emissions. Tech giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon, as well as dedicated cloud companies with less instantly recognisable names, “run huge data centres with thousands of servers that store your files securely”, he adds, and “when you save a file to the cloud, it gets sent over the internet to a remote server”.
Data centres are set up with multiple servers and systems to ensure that if one fails, customers can still access their files. And if your phone breaks down or your laptop goes on the blink, your data is safe. Essentially, Jackson says, “cloud storage makes digital life easier – no more worrying about running out of space or losing important memories”.
If data consumption continues unabated, electricity demand driven by data could exceed global electricity production by 2033
Ian Hodgkinson, Loughborough University professor
But as our lives increasingly play out online, we’re generating more and more data. In 2010, for example, two zettabytes (that’s one billion terabytes, and a terabyte is equivalent to one thousand gigabytes, if you want to try and get an idea of the scope) of data were generated around the world. 10 years later, in 2020, the amount rose to 32 zettabytes. This year, it’s estimated that around 180 zettabytes of data will be created globally, this “equates to more than 6.8 billion years of continuous high quality Netflix streaming”, says Jackson’s colleague and project co-lead, Professor Ian Hodgkinson. And as time goes on, the amount is “set to expand rapidly, so much so that by 2035 global data creation is expected to exceed 2,000 zettabytes”.
These are numbers so big, they’re hard to get your head around. Martin Butler, professor of digital transformation at Vlerick Business School, puts it in more tangible terms: if data storage occupied as much space as a garden shed a decade ago, he says, now it’s more akin to a sprawling Great Wall of China. One of the main drivers for this, he adds, “is the ubiquity of connected devices, with every user and device becoming a constant source of data production”. Every message, document or selfie adds up.
And as technology, including AI, becomes ever more advanced, more data is generated. “One of the biggest drivers is the rise of AI and large language models [systems that can understand and generate plausibly human text],” explains Olivier Subramanian, head of cloud advisory at tech consultancy BJSS, because these “require enormous data sets and computational power” in order to work properly.
As annoying as it might be to keep paying out for our personal data storage, the environmental implications are far, far more alarming. Data centres are now responsible for more emissions than the aviation industry. The powerful processors “require large and constant electrical input”, says Jackson, and every hard drive – and back-up device – must “remain powered and accessible” in case a customer needs access (data never sleeps).
All of this generates serious amounts of heat, and so another hugely energy-intensive part of the process is cooling. In many data centres, cold water is piped around the servers, because using liquid is about 3,000 times more efficient than using an air system. This can “often account for up to half of the centre’s total energy use”, Butler says. More data means more energy required to run and cool down more servers, and therefore more carbon emissions. Vast amounts of water get used up, too: in 2021, the average Google data centre consumed around 450,000 gallons of water every single day, according to stats released by the tech company.
In research published last year, Jackson, Hodgkinson and their colleague Dr Vitor Castro predicted that we are currently on a path towards a “data doomsday”. Based on current projections, global electricity supply from renewable energy sources won’t be able to meet the demand from digital data this year, which “risks increasing reliance on fossil fuels, especially during periods of peak energy demand”, Hodgkinson says. They’ve estimated that “if data consumption continues unabated, electricity demand driven by data could exceed global electricity production by 2033”. That’s only eight years away – terrifying, right?
Individual actions, like clearing out old files or photos, can make a difference, even if they seem small on their own
Olivier Subramanian, head of cloud advisory at BJSS
It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that your photos from that holiday in 2016 aren’t singularly responsible for a potential climate apocalypse. Research estimates that somewhere between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of cloud data storage is used up by individual consumers (rather than businesses), says Butler, and many of us do “have rather poor data hygiene practices, like taking 10 pictures when one will do, or never cleaning personal data”.
But this, he notes, still “pales in comparison to what large enterprises do”. Social media giants and media companies generate and consume vast amounts through targeted advertising, video content and the metadata that comes with it.
Ultimately, Butler adds, “this is business for Big Tech”, so “there is no motivation for Google, Amazon, Microsoft and [Chinese tech company] Alibaba to reduce the amount of data stored for their customers”. After all, they want to sell products, services and subscriptions.
Instead, he says, they “will work on reducing the impact per unit of data stored” and, he concedes, they “have done that rather well”. Last year, Google signed up to use small-scale nuclear reactors to power its data centres; by 2030, the company is aiming for net zero emissions. Microsoft, meanwhile, is constructing data centres using wood to reduce the carbon footprint. Tech innovations should allow us to “store more data in smaller spaces”, too, Butler says.
But just as we can all try to recycle more and cut back on single use plastic, our own digital behaviour is still important. “Individual actions, like clearing out old files or photos, can make a difference, even if they seem small on their own,” says Subramanian. “While your cloud footprint might appear insignificant, when multiplied by billions of users, the impact becomes substantial.” He reckons that we should “think before [we] store: do you really need to keep that email or those 10 nearly identical photos? Is it necessary to create a dozen AI-generated Studio Ghibli images of you and your family?”
But what about sorting through our back catalogues, given that most of us are the not-so-proud owners of at least a decade or so’s cumulative digital ephemera, hoarded across various platforms and devices? It’s not fun, glamorous or even as satisfying as filling up a bin bag, but simply deleting files that you no longer need is a good place to start, says Mei.
Clean-up apps are designed to automate much of this work, but they often charge a subscription fee (and do you really want a third-party app accessing your personal data?) Instead, you can go through manually by looking at the size and last used date of the file, and blitzing the biggest and oldest first. When you’re pondering over what to keep and what to delete, Mei recommends channelling your inner Marie Kondo and asking yourself a series of questions: “Do I need it? Do I use it? Do I enjoy it?”
Repeating the process with your emails can help free up Cloud space too (especially if you’re always dealing with attachment-laden messages).
The key, Mei adds, is to keep doing this regularly, and “getting your files and folders in order” will help you “find things easily and avoid duplications” – consider it a “tidy desk policy, for your digital world”. Oh, and it might sound obvious, but make sure you delete stuff from the trash can on your Cloud as well as on your device.
There are other quick swaps that you can make, too, such as using more storage-friendly formats for your images (avoid space-hogging TIFFs and consider trying Google’s WebP format, which was designed for efficiency), or compressing them if you can cope with the lower resolution. On Apple devices, you can also control which apps actually get backed up to the cloud: social media platforms and streaming services, for example, tend to have their own servers, so backing them up is pretty redundant. And you can, of course, invest in physical storage devices, like portable hard drives, to back up and store files that you don’t use very often.
When you’ve had a smartphone for years, your message history starts to eat up a decent chunk of storage. If you have one friend whose voice notes are starting to become more like fully fledged podcasts, consider targeting that conversation and deleting those files (unless they have loads of sentimental value). You can also change your settings on WhatsApp and opt out of automatically downloading every single file you’re sent; you’ll find that your storage is no longer clogged up with other people’s blurry gig videos and naff memes.
More than anything, though, we need to change the way we think about our data: instead of viewing it as something nebulous and intangible, it’s time to start considering the very real implications, and remembering that the cost is more than just financial. “Just because data is invisible doesn’t mean it’s carbon neutral,” Jackson says. “Every file has a footprint.”