Here is my plain English explanation of “the cloud” without the technical gobbledygook.

“The Cloud” is storage for your digital stuff (movies and photos). Companies like Dropbox, Apple, and Google provide cloud storage space for a small fee (often less than $5 bucks a month).

This storage is on the Internet rather than on your computer. So if your computer breaks or is lost, your cloud data is not. Simply log into your cloud account with another computer, tablet, or cell phone, and you’ll find your data is right where it belongs.

Even if a disaster befalls your cloud service provider, your data is still very likely safe.

Without getting into the weeds, cloud service providers keep your data on multiple, secure computers in different, far-apart locations so if one computer goes down, the rest are still active. Not to make light of this, but it would take a world-wide catastrophic event for you to lose your data with a cloud service.

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