If you share your photos on social media, they will stay on the internet forever…

Many of us have heard or read this sentence during conversations with friends, in articles, online forums, TV shows, etc.

But how is it possible that we can’t seem to be able to fully remove our photos from the internet when we want to, and, taking this further, that our photos are never lost and always retrievable (which can both be a good and a bad thing)?

The behind-the-scenes, technical secret lies in data replication.

The very first moment when you share a photo on social media, that photo is uploaded into the closest available database server. In the second moment, that same photo is replicated into multiple other servers around the world.

This is what data …