midgey
Caravansera I was going to say that the cloud contributes massively to global warming too. Does anyone need to keep every email ever?
No, but it's necessary to keep some in case the need arises to check something from several years ago, particularly as we are frequently encouraged to go paperless. I certainly keep copies of insurance documents and bills.
Personal storage isn't real the issue. Take Doodledog's example above. She has under 30Gb of music that she would like to put in cloud storage. At the moment, it takes up a tiny memory chip inside a small phone. Fair enough, a world population of 8 billion people doing the same thing would take up more space but even then, it would look insignificant besides the vast amount of government, NGO and corporate memory space needed so that governements, organisations and businesses can operate and so that individuals can have access 24/7 to everything that they now demand digitally.
For everybody who has shopped online today, booked a holiday, renewed their car insurance, checked their WhatsApp messages, watched TV and a myriad of other digital applications, including accessing this site via a web browser, they have contributed to the problem because the data as to be stored somewhere ready for retrieval when we demand it.
We aren't go to return to analog communcation unless terrorism knocks out our power systems or there's an apocalypse. The only answer is green energy and, as we know, a decarbonised power sector and net zero are political hot potatoes.