When you're playing your video games, you might need to save it before shutting off the system to eat dinner or maybe even shower every so often right? When you save it, the data is stored on a hard drive inside the system so that it can loaded back up later. A database is a large collection of hard drives that systems from all different physical locations can connect to through the internet or other similar connection. They can save and load their information to and from these hard drives. The data is saved to multiple drives so that if one dive stops working, the information isn't lost.