Forum Topics How much energy does it take to store 20,000 photos in the cloud? Bit of trivia for Australia Day.
Mallers
Added a month ago

It befuddles me as to why some people take multiple photos of EVERY meal they are about to consume! At the risk of sounding like an “on the fence greenie” I asked Chat GPT to do a summary of how much electrical energy is required over a ten-year period in a “cloud data centre*” in order to store my 20,000 photos (mainly old work stuff). 

Assume I will then want to look at 10% of them regularly, requiring energy to search and retrieve, and promise to discard/delete 50% of them over the next two years. What are the energy figures like then?   

*There is no actual thing like “Cloud Storage”. Your photos are stored in a physical data centre somewhere on this planet, usually in multiple duplicated locations!

AND as we move to immersion cooling in Data Centres these energy figures will likely half again…

 

Here’s a reasoned, data-based estimate of how much electrical energy is consumed to store your 20,000 photos in a typical “cloud data centre” over a 10-year period, and how that compares to normal household energy use — including the effects of deletion and retrieval activity.




???? Step 1 — Estimate your data footprint

First we need a rough estimate of the size of your 20,000 photos:

  • A typical smartphone/work photo might be 3–8 MB.
  • Taking a central value of 5 MB per photo gives:
  • 20,000 photos × 5 MB ≈ 100,000 MB ≈ 100 GB (0.1 TB)

So your entire photo collection is roughly 0.1 terabytes (TB) of stored data.




???? Step 2 — How much energy is used to store data in the cloud

Estimates for the amount of electricity consumed per TB stored in a cloud data center vary a bit, but a reasonable industry figure is:

  • ≈ 40–70 kWh per TB per year of storage, including servers, backups, cooling, networking, etc.

This is an average across many providers and accounts for the fact that big cloud operators replicate and protect data in multiple locations.

So for your data (0.1 TB):

Time period

Storage energy use

1 year

~ 4–7 kWh

10 years

~ 40–70 kWh

That’s the energy used simply to keep your photos stored and maintained in a standard cloud service.

For context: 40–70 kWh per year is roughly like running a small refrigerator for a few days. The cloud figure reflects not just your data on disk but all supporting infra (servers, backup copies, cooling, power conversion losses).




???? Step 3 — Access / retrieve energy cost

Looking at retrieval and search activity:

  • Cloud storage systems must index and serve data when you request it.
  • The incremental energy for retrieving a small file (e.g., a photo) from a cloud is very low — essentially the energy to read and network < 1>

Estimating very roughly:

  • Assume each retrieval costs ~0.005 kWh (5 Wh) “above baseline” per photo viewed (very generous for a read operation).
  • If you view 10% of your photos regularly (~2,000 photos/year):
  • 2,000 view ops × 0.005 kWh ≈ 10 kWh per year

So added retrieval energy might be ~10 kWh/year, or 100 kWh across ten years, on top of storage energy.

This would put your total estimated energy footprint over ten years ~140–170 kWh.




???? Step 4 — Effects of deletion over time

You said you plan to delete 50% of the photos over the next two years:

  • If you delete half, your storage size drops to 0.05 TB after year 2.
  • Storage energy then falls proportionally.

A simple model:

Years

Avg data stored

Storage energy (est)

0–2

~0.1 TB

~4–7 kWh/year → ~8–14 kWh

2–10

~0.05 TB

~2–3.5 kWh/year → ~16–28 kWh

Total storage 10-year

—

~24–42 kWh

Retrieval 10-year

—

~100 kWh

Total over 10 years with deletion + retrieval: ~124–142 kWh

So deleting half your photos significantly reduces the storage energy, but the energy to retrieve what you regularly access stays roughly the same.




⭐ Comparisons — Cloud vs Household Energy

Let’s put these figures into perspective with typical household electricity use (Australian context, approximate):

  • Average Australian home uses around 5,000–6,000 kWh per year.
  • (Typical annual residential electricity use in Australia)†

Your 10-year photo energy footprint (even including retrieval):

≈ 140 kWh total

Comparisons:

  • That’s ≈2.8% of one year’s household electricity use (140 / 5,000 × 100).
  • Or like leaving a 60 W light bulb on for ~2,300 hours (~3 months).

In other words, the energy cost of storing and viewing your 20,000 photos in the cloud is negligible relative to your household’s total electricity usage.




???? Key takeaways

✔ Your storage footprint ~0.1 TB implies cloud storage energy ≈ 40–70 kWh over 10 years.

✔ Regular viewing (2,000 photos/year) adds perhaps ~10 kWh/year, ~100 kWh over 10 yrs.

✔ Deleting half after 2 years reduces storage energy, giving a reasonable total ~124–142 kWh over 10 yrs.

✔ Compared with a typical household’s 5,000–6,000 kWh/year, your photo energy use is tiny.



???? Notes & uncertainties

  • Cloud providers don’t publish precise per-file energy, so these figures are estimates based on range data.
  • Real retrieval energy is likely much lower than my conservative 0.005 kWh assumption per view.
  • These figures include only electricity used in datacentres, not network and end-device energy.


Regards, Mallers in Melbourne. 

.... I give up, go ahead, I will wait until you take a perfect photo of your dinner!

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Noddy74
Added a month ago

That's interesting @Mallers

I've got another energy-related fun fact. Just as AI models tend to stroke our egos over how smart our prompts are, humans often speak to the models using human conventions, including saying "please" and "thank you". Last year Sam Altman was asked how much minding our Ps & Qs cost Open AI in extra compute. He said it cost them "tens of millions of dollars".

I asked Gemini to estimate a more precise figure and extrapolate that over all the AI models. It used other sources that estimate between 5 and 10% of all AI interactions are basically just manners. In its estimation you could fill thousands of Olympic swimming pools with water and spend $1-3 billion in energy for the compute to process good manners. You know what they say about $1 billion don't you - a billion here, a billion there and before you know it, you're talking about real money.

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tomsmithidg
Added a month ago

I reckon anyone storing their photos (or any other data off their phone or computer) in the 'cloud' are nuts. Download the images off your phone / device and then back them up on an SSD that you physically hold is the best procedure I reckon. I don't like trusting anyone else with my data wherever I can realistically avoid it.

(pay no attention to my tinfoil hat - it's a fashion choice)

6
lowway
Added a month ago

We'll have to start calling you Al (foil) @tomsmithidg if you keep that up!!

Nice post @Mallers. It's funny how we think (incorrectly) that running your own NAS or other forms of home backup would be cheaper than cloud.

Just to take it a step further, I asked my chick "Gemini" to give me some additional info on cloud energy savings we haven't considered here. Have a read if you're that way inclined:

To understand the energy profile of "Cold" or "Archive" storage, we have to look at it as a mechanical system rather than an electronic one. In standard computing, we expect components to be "on" to be useful. Cold storage flips this logic, treating data like a physical book in a library: it consumes no energy while sitting on the shelf, and only "costs" energy when a librarian (the system) goes to retrieve it.

Here is the deep dive into how a "zero-watt" state is achieved and maintained.

1. The Physics of Media: Why Tape Wins

The primary medium for cold storage is LTO (Linear Tape-Open). Unlike a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which must maintain a constant rotational speed (often 7,200 RPM) to allow the read-head to float on a cushion of air, tape is linear.

  • Static State: When data is written to a tape, it is stored as magnetic polarities on a spool. This requires zero electrical current to maintain. A tape can sit in a climate-controlled vault for 30 years without a single watt of power being applied to it.
  • Mechanical Separation: In a data center, the "media" (the tape) is physically separated from the "drive" (the player). One tape drive can service thousands of tapes. This ratio drastically reduces the idle power consumption of the storage ecosystem.


2. Robotic Orchestration

The "Cloud" interface for cold storage is actually a layer of software sitting in front of a Robotic Tape Library.

  • The Library: A massive honeycomb of slots holding thousands of tape cartridges.
  • The Robotics: When you request a file from an archive (e.g., Amazon Glacier), a robotic picker moves along a rail, grabs the specific cartridge, and inserts it into a tape drive.
  • Energy Consumption: The only significant energy spikes occur during these mechanical movements. Once the tape is loaded and the data is copied to a "hot" buffer for you to download, the tape is ejected and the power draw returns to near zero.


3. Advanced Power Management: MAID

In scenarios where tape isn't used, providers use MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks). This is a specialized architecture designed to keep 90% of the hard drives in a rack powered off.

  • Spin-Down Cycles: Drives are organized into "zones." Only the zone being written to or read from is spinning.
  • The "Vibration" Benefit: By keeping drives powered off, data centers also save energy on cooling. Spinning disks generate heat; non-spinning disks do not. This creates a compounding energy saving—less heat generated means the massive data center HVAC systems can run at lower speeds.


4. The "Latency for Power" Trade-off

The reason cold storage is so energy-efficient is that it sells latency. In the technology world, there is a direct correlation between Speed of Access and Energy Consumed.

Storage Tier Access Time Energy State

Hot (SSD/HDD) Milliseconds Always On: Electrons must be ready to move instantly.

Warm (HDD) Seconds Standby: Drives may need to "spin up," but the controller is live.

Cold (Tape/MAID) Minutes to Hours Off-Line: The media is physically inert until requested.


5. Embodied Energy & Lifecycle

Sustainability in cold storage also includes the Embodied Energy—the electricity used to manufacture the storage media.

  • Manufacturing Footprint: Producing a single 20TB Hard Drive is an energy-intensive process involving rare earth metals and complex clean-room assembly. Because HDDs have moving parts that wear out, they are usually replaced every 5 years.
  • Tape Longevity: A tape cartridge is simpler to manufacture and lasts significantly longer (up to 30 years). Over a 30-year period, a data center would need to manufacture 6 generations of hard drives to store the same data that one set of tapes could hold. This makes the long-term energy "cost" of the data's existence much lower.


Summary of the "Zero-Watt" Logic

The cloud archive is the only form of computing where growth in data volume does not require a linear growth in power consumption. You can add 100 Petabytes of tape to a library, and as long as no one is reading it, the power bill of the facility remains virtually unchanged.

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