GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

Shelling out a fortune for digital storage? Katie Rosseinsky explores why our data usage is out of control, and asks the experts about the very troubling impact on the environment

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"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?